By Jonathan Wright
Cairo - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called on Thursday 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.
At the closing session of the annual ruling party conference, Mubarak also found fault with United States policy in the Middle East for paying too little attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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.
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"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.
Egypt 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.
It 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.
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