Rosatom’s Izhora works in St Petersburg has finished the last of the heavy forgings for the first reactor at El Dabaa, the nuclear station on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. The reactor vessel internals and the VVER-1200 reactor head are now manufactured, and together they weigh about 340 tonnes. With the vessel already in place, no major piece of reactor hardware for the unit remains to be built.
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El Dabaa sits about 320 kilometers northwest of Cairo and will hold four VVER-1200 reactors totaling 4.8 gigawatts. Unit 1 got its first concrete in July 2022, and unit 4 followed in January 2024, so all four are under construction almost at once. Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, called the completed internals and head “a crucial step in the construction of the power unit.”
What 340 tonnes of internals and head actually are
Reporting on the milestone, World Nuclear News said the internals comprise the shaft, the baffle and the protective tube block. Rosatom describes these parts and the reactor lid as the basis of the reactor core: they hold the fuel in position and keep the core tight and safe. Added to the previously assembled vessel, the total mass of key reactor equipment for the unit exceeds 670 tonnes, and the new pieces still have to be shipped to Egypt.
Installation comes next. Construction crews will fit the internals and head, then the remaining reactor hall equipment, and then move toward commissioning. No date for the shipment or for fuel loading appears in the report.
A vessel installed in November 2025 and a containment rising
The vessel itself was a 330-tonne forging about 13 meters long and 4.5 meters across, built over 41 months at Izhora. It reached El Dabaa’s port on Oct. 21, 2025, after a 20-day sea voyage, and World Nuclear News recorded the quote from Alexey Kononenko, a vice president at Atomstroyexport and the project director, who called its installation the year’s most important production event. The vessel carries a 60-year design life, extendable to 80.
Earlier, in March 2025, Izhora finished the closing weld on the vessel in a 10-day process that consumed about 2 tonnes of flux and more than 1.5 tonnes of special wire. Rosatom said the work was needed to guarantee safe operation for at least 60 years. Inspection by X-ray, ultrasound and capillary methods followed the heat treatment.
On Nov. 19, 2025, presidents Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Vladimir Putin joined the vessel installation ceremony remotely. Sisi called the plant a “dream that finally became a reality,” and Putin said the work showed the project is progressing well, adding that roughly 55 percent of contracting and subcontracting orders were localized in Egypt, according to the World Nuclear News account of the ceremony. A 2,200-tonne crawler crane lifted the vessel into position. Concreting of the fourth tier of the reactor building’s inner containment was finished in August 2026.
Egypt’s 2030 target and the 2017 contracts
The design is not new to Rosatom. El Dabaa’s VVER-1200 is the same model as units at Leningrad and Novovoronezh in Russia and at Ostrovets in Belarus, which gives the vendor operating references to draw on, and Rosatom says it is aiming for a future service life of up to 100 years for its plants. The Nuclear Power Plants Authority’s chairman, Sherif Helmy, said ahead of the vessel installation that the work was scheduled for mid-November 2025, and it was carried out on that timetable.
Other units are a step behind. Construction at unit 2 started in November 2022, and unit 3 received its construction licence in March 2023, according to Engineering News, which also reports that the station is expected to supply up to 50 percent of Egypt’s generation capacity once all four units run. The plant is owned by Egypt’s Ministry of Electricity and Energy through the authority, and the nameplate total of 4.8 gigawatts makes it one of the largest single energy projects in the country.
Egypt’s first nuclear power plant exists to cut oil and gas burn. The country aims for nuclear to generate 9 percent of its electricity by 2030, a goal that requires the first two units to be in commercial operation by then. Under contracts that took effect in December 2017, Rosatom builds the plant, supplies Russian fuel for its full life cycle, builds a used-fuel storage facility and helps train and support Egyptian staff for the first 10 years of operation. Engineering News reported that more than 20,000 people were working on site by late 2025.
El Dabaa is also Africa’s first nuclear station since South Africa’s Koeberg plant, built nearly 40 years ago. With the hardware for unit 1 complete, the schedule risk shifts from factories to the construction site, and the 2030 target for two operating units now depends on installation, testing and fuel delivery staying on the pace Rosatom and Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority have set.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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