President Lee due to visit UAE to help sell nuclear power plants

By Byun Duk-kun
SEOUL, Dec. 26 (Yonhap) -- President Lee Myung-bak will visit the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) this weekend as part of South Korea's last-minute efforts to win a
multi-billion dollar nuclear power plant project in the oil-rich country,
officials said Saturday.

A South Korean consortium, led by the state-run Korea Electric Power Corporation,
is vying with an international consortium led by France's AREVA for the project.
"If South Korea is named the successful bidder, it's a victory of our technology,
diplomacy and negotiations," Lee Dong-kwan, top secretary to the president for
public relations, told reporters. "It will be a milestone on the road to an era
of South Korean nuclear power plants in the international community," he added.
The UAE's nuclear plant project is expected to generate contracts worth over
US$41 billion in total. It was not clear how much the project the South Korean
consortium was bidding for was worth.
If South Korea wins the deal, it will be its first sale of nuclear power plants
abroad.
South Korea is a world leader in nuclear power technology. It currently has 20
nuclear power plants in operation and is building several more. It gets nearly
half of its electricity from nuclear energy.
South Korea first built its nuclear power industry with U.S. technology in the
1970s. It has since localized over 95 percent of the technology, according to the
industry data.
South Korean government was cautious about the prospect of winning the UAE
project but industry analysts see Lee's trip itself as a hopeful sign that the
project will likely be given to the South Korean consortium.
"Whether South Korea will win the nuclear plant project is still unclear, but
President Lee's trip to the UAE will be part of our diplomatic efforts to win the
project," the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said.
President Lee is scheduled to head back home late Sunday after a meeting with his
UAE counterpart, Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, according to Cheong Wa Dae.
bdk@yna.co.kr
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