The name says something before the plant even does. In Arabic, “barakah” means blessing or divine grace — a word carrying connotations of abundance, protection, and goodwill. It is a fitting choice for a project that the UAE’s leadership hoped would fundamentally change the country’s energy future. Whether the name was chosen with deliberate symbolism or simply reflected the character of the site, it turned out to be appropriate.
In 2008, the United Arab Emirates made a decision that had no precedent in the Arab world. A country built on oil wealth announced it would generate electricity from nuclear energy. At the time, that choice raised eyebrows internationally and sparked debate at home. Fifteen years later, the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant stands fully operational on the coast of Abu Dhabi, producing a quarter of the country’s electricity without burning a single barrel of oil or cubic metre of gas. It is one of the most significant infrastructure projects in the history of the region, and its story is worth telling in full.
The UAE’s motivation was straightforward, even if the solution was not. Rapid population growth and accelerating industrial and urban expansion created serious challenges related to energy security and environmental sustainability. The country was consuming gas at a pace that threatened its own energy independence, and the leadership understood that betting the grid entirely on fossil fuels was not a strategy that would hold.
The UAE embarked upon a nuclear power programme in close consultation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and with strong public support. In December 2009, after a competitive international tender that included bids from France and the United States, ENEC awarded a $20.4 billion contract to a consortium led by Korea Electric Power Corporation for the design, construction and operation of four APR1400 nuclear power units. The consortium included Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, Hyundai, Samsung, Doosan, Korea Power Engineering Company, and Korea Plant Service and Engineering.
The choice of South Korea was significant. KEPCO had built a proven track record with the APR1400 reactor design at home, and the Koreans offered a complete package: engineering, construction, fuel supply, and operational support. It was not just a construction contract but a transfer of technology and institutional knowledge that the UAE intended to absorb over decades.
The site preparation licence application for the Barakah plant was submitted to the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation in April 2010, and the official groundbreaking ceremony was held in March 2011. The chosen location was the Al Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi, a stretch of coastline on the Arabian Gulf roughly 53 kilometres west-southwest of Al Dhannah City. The site offered access to seawater for cooling, sufficient distance from major population centres, and stable geology.
In July 2012, FANR issued the construction licence for Units 1 and 2, and the pouring of safety-related concrete for Unit 1 began that same month. Construction of Unit 2 followed in May 2013, and the licences for Units 3 and 4 were approved by September 2014. With the start of construction of Unit 4 in 2015, Barakah became the world’s largest nuclear energy construction site, with four identical reactors being safely constructed simultaneously on one site.
The scale of the undertaking was difficult to comprehend from the outside. Tens of thousands of workers on a remote coastline, assembling reactor vessels, steam generators, containment structures, and cooling systems in parallel. The project was not without difficulties. Regulatory reviews by FANR identified hundreds of technical and management issues that required resolution before fuel loading could begin, contributing to a delay of roughly two and a half years against the original schedule. The regulator’s rigour, often frustrating to project timelines, ultimately validated the safety of the final product.
Unit 1 was connected to the national grid in August 2020, and the second unit commenced commercial operations in September 2021. Unit 3 was connected to the grid in October 2022, and Unit 4 followed in March 2024, achieving commercial operation in September 2024.
The pace of each successive start-up improved noticeably. Unit 3 was delivered four months faster than the Unit 2 schedule, and five months faster than the Unit 1 schedule, demonstrating the significant benefit of building multiple units within a phased timeline. The units came online within eight years from first concrete pour to fuel load, and achieved a 40 percent improvement in schedule from start of operational readiness to commercial operations for Unit 4 compared to Unit 1. The learning curve was steep and real.
The fourth and final unit beginning commercial operation meant that Barakah was now generating 40 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, nearly the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of New Zealand. The UAE president described the moment as a significant step on the journey toward net zero.
The numbers tell part of the story. Natural gas consumption for power generation in Abu Dhabi has reached a 13-year low, thanks to the electricity supplied by Barakah, and this shift has allowed the UAE energy sector to avoid more than nine billion dollars in costs associated with using liquefied natural gas for electricity production.
Every year, the Barakah facility avoids 22.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, contributing 24 percent toward the UAE’s 2030 decarbonisation target. This is equivalent to the emissions of nearly five million cars, and constitutes a quarter of the UAE’s emission reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement.
Since Unit 1 began operations, more than 120 terawatt-hours have been generated in total, equivalent to the annual power demand of New York City. Before Barakah, over 95 percent of the UAE’s electricity came from fossil fuels. That figure has shifted materially in the space of just a few years.
Beyond the grid, the plant has had an economic effect that extends well past electricity bills. Barakah provides 24/7 baseload clean electricity which ensures grid stability to support the expansion of renewable energy projects, and powers home-grown industries such as steelmaking and aluminium smelting, which rely on stable around-the-clock electricity supply. Major industrial operators including ADNOC, Emirates Global Aluminium, and EMSTEEL are among those directly benefiting from clean energy certificates tied to Barakah’s output.
The plant has helped to establish a highly skilled Emirati-led nuclear workforce, with over 2,000 UAE nationals contributing to the development and operation of the plant in partnership with international experts. That human capital, built over more than a decade, is one of Barakah’s less visible but most enduring legacies.
Each of Barakah’s four reactors is an APR1400, a pressurised water reactor developed by the South Korean nuclear industry. The APR1400 is a Generation III+ design, meaning it incorporates passive safety systems that can cool the reactor without requiring external power or active operator intervention in emergency scenarios. The plant operates using a defence-in-depth system that incorporates multiple redundant safety mechanisms capable of responding to a wide range of emergency scenarios, and has undergone more than 500 inspections and technical reviews both within and outside the UAE, in addition to over 100 assessment missions conducted by the IAEA and the World Association of Nuclear Operators.
The Barakah plant provides a global case study for new nuclear energy plants, with a highly efficient average delivery time of 7.9 years per unit. In a global context where nuclear construction projects in Western countries have struggled with delays and cost overruns measured in years and billions, Barakah’s execution record stands out. The combination of a single reactor design repeated four times, a disciplined contractor consortium, and a well-resourced client organisation produced results that the broader nuclear industry has taken notice of.
In November 2024, ENEC and ADNOC announced plans to evaluate the deployment of advanced nuclear technology such as small modular reactors to support the UAE’s energy diversification strategy, and will look into using excess heat from the Barakah nuclear power plant in ADNOC’s oil and gas operations.
On the fuel supply side, in July 2025 ENEC signed a fuel supply agreement with Framatome to supply nuclear fuel assemblies for the Barakah plant, manufactured at Framatome’s facility in Richland, Washington, as part of a fuel qualification programme to diversify the plant’s fuel supply chain. Reducing dependence on any single supplier for fuel is a straightforward energy security measure, and the move signals that ENEC is thinking in decades, not years.
The Barakah plant was designed with the potential for future development, and although ENEC’s stated focus is currently on operational excellence at the four units, the success of the project is opening doors for partnerships globally, with the UAE’s proven ability to execute complex nuclear programmes attracting interest from countries considering their own programmes.
The project duration of the Barakah nuclear power plant is expected to run from 2017 to 2084, which is 60 years from the start of commercial operation of Unit 4. Decommissioning plans have already been submitted as part of the operating licence applications, with the process expected to last roughly 13 years per unit after the final shutdown.
What Barakah represents is harder to quantify than megawatts or carbon tonnes. It is a demonstration that a country with no prior nuclear history, no domestic nuclear industry, and a population of under ten million could conceptualise, finance, regulate, build, and operate four nuclear reactors within a generation. In the past five years, the UAE has added more clean electricity per capita than any other nation globally, with 75 percent coming solely from the Barakah plant.
For the Arab world specifically, Barakah has broken a psychological barrier. Nuclear energy is no longer something that other countries do. The plant on the Abu Dhabi coastline is proof that it can be done here, with local teams, to international standards, at a speed that surprised even its builders. Whatever comes next for the UAE’s energy programme, that proof is already written into the record.
