The facility will be built at Braka, 53 km southwest of the Gulf coast town of Ruwais in western Abu Dhabi in a sparsely populated area of desert.

The ENEC said on Thursday that it has submitted license applications for the proposed location to local regulators, who must give the green light to any nuclear sites.

The 13-sq-km  site was chosen from 10 possible locations across the country based on criteria that included seismic history, distance from population centers, security and access to evacuation routes.

“The selection of our preferred site is the result of an evaluation process that meets or exceeds international standards. The evaluation has provided an extensive amount of information which ENEC has used in its determination of where in the UAE we can locate nuclear power plants in the safest manner,” said Mohammed Al-Hammadi, ENEC’s chief executive officer.

The ENEC has asked Emirati regulators to rule on its site preparation licensing request for the atomic power plants’ site by July 5 so work can move ahead. The country hopes to have its first reactor running by 2017.

The ENEC will hold a public meeting with area residents in the coming weeks to discuss the site selection process, development plans and the economic and job opportunities that will be created if the plants are built. According to figures, the country’s energy needs are expected to almost double by 2020.

Despite its immense oil wealth, the UAE must import natural gas to run many of its existing power plants, which struggle to consistently provide electricity to all customers, especially in the hot summer months.

The federal government in Abu Dhabi last year awarded a South Korean consortium the highly anticipated $20 billion contract to build four 1,400-megawatt reactors. Korea Electric Power Corp.’s bid beat out rivals from France, Japan and the United States, and marks the first time South Korea will export a nuclear power plant.

In its push for nuclear technology, the UAE signed a deal with the US to import, rather than produce, fuel for its nuclear reactors. The Emirates committed not to enrich uranium or reprocess spent nuclear fuel into plutonium, which is used in nuclear bombs.

Washington had promoted its plan to help the UAE develop peaceful nuclear power as a model of the kind of cooperation it would like to achieve with Iran, which the US and its allies suspect is using a civilian program as a cover to develop an atomic weapons capability.

Although the Arab state has long-standing commercial and cultural ties to Iran, it is also wary of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

— With input from agencies