CAIRO - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday called for a national dialogue on using nuclear power as a source of energy, saying it was cheap and clean and could help Egypt manage its energy resources efficiently.

On nuclear energy, Mubarak was following up on an energy policy paper put to the three-day conference of his National Democratic Party (NDP) and supported this week by his son, senior party official Gamal Mubarak.

Gamal, at 42 an assistant secretary-general of the party and head of the policies team, was prominent in managing the conference but the delegates did not take any formal steps to enhance his position.

	Advertisement

Analysts and the opposition say the Mubarak family and Gamal's supporters in the party are preparing him to succeed his 78-year-old father through constitutional means. Gamal has said he does not have presidential ambitions.

"We must take more advantage of new and renewable energy sources, including the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and I call for a serious dialogue which takes into account the clean and cheap sources of energy available through nuclear technologies," the president said.

"We do not start from a vacuum, and we possess a knowledge of these techniques which enables us to proceed," he added.

Cairo abandoned serious plans to develop nuclear power stations decades ago but it does maintain a small experimental reactor and it has never closed down the nuclear department at the Ministry of Electricity.

Egypt is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear activities are subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Authority, which raised some questions last year about research at the reactor.

The country depends almost entirely on hydrocarbons for electricity production, especially natural gas from the Western Desert and the Mediterranean.