The United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Japan, said it was likely that Japanese technology would be used in four nuclear reactors currently under construction.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is on a tour of the area to sell Japanese Nuclear Technology, and signed the agreement with his UAE counterpart Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashif al-Maktoum in Dubai.  The four plants are expected to be operations by 2020, and each would have a generating capacity of 1,400 Megawatts.

Australia, the US, UK, South Korea, Argentina, France, Canada, and Russia also have cooperation agreements with the UAE.   They’re all written pretty much the same, with nations agreeing to transfer knowledge, technology, and nuclear material.

It seems the UAE does not want all of its energy eggs in one basket.  A couple of weeks ago, the UAE opened one of the world’s biggest Solar Energy plants, the 100-megawatt Shams 1 facility.  It works by concentrating heat from direct sunlight onto oil-filled pipes, producing steam, which then drives a turbine to generate electricity. 

Shams 1 generates enough clean, risk-free electricity to power 20 thousand homes in the UAE, but would be dwarfed by the generating capacity of the proposed nukes.