CAIRO, July 18. /TASS/. The first nuclear equipment will be installed at the first power unit of the El-Dabaa nuclear power plant, which is under construction in Egypt, on October 6 this year, Chairman of Nuclear Power Plants Authority (NPPA) Amgad al-Wakil said on Tuesday.

He announced this during a joint visit of the Minister of Energy Mohamed Shaker and the Russian delegation headed by head of state corporation Rosatom Alexey Likhachev to the construction site.

"This year, permission will be obtained for the construction of the fourth power unit and the pouring of the first concrete will begin, which is one of the main milestones in the implementation of the project, and we will also witness the installation of the first nuclear equipment at the first power unit - the "melt trap" on October 6 this year," al-Wakil said in a statement posted on the NPPA website.

The NPPA Chairman "highly appreciated the relations between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Russian Federation, explaining that these are historical relations, the roots of which go back to the 1950s."

According to him, "bilateral relations reached their peak and prosperity during the presidency of [Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi, when Russia was chosen as a strategic partner for the implementation of the first Egyptian nuclear power plant project in El-Dabaa."

According to the Egyptian side, during a visit to the construction site, the Russian delegation, accompanied by the head of the Egyptian Ministry of Energy and the chairman of the NPPA, "assessed the progress of ongoing work on the construction of the first, second and third power units of the nuclear power plant, as well as the progress of preliminary work at the fourth power unit." In addition, the head of Rosatom, together with the Egyptian minister, took part in the grand opening of the administrative building of the nuclear power plant department for generating electricity at the El-Dabaa site.

El-Dabaa will be the first nuclear power plant in Egypt and Rosatom’s first major project in Africa.

It will be built in El-Dabaa city in the Governorate of Matrouh on the Mediterranean Sea coastline. The El Dabaa NPP will comprise four units, with each of them having a capacity of 1200 MW, equipped with a Generation III+ VVER-1200 reactor. The total cost of construction is $30 billion. Egypt expects that the NPP will operate at full capacity by 2030.