Business & Money | Sunday 25 December, 2016 11:00 am |

The second meeting of the joint Saudi-Korean Steering Committee for the System-integrated Modular Advanced Reactor (SMART) concluded in Seoul recently. 
From the Saudi side, the meeting was chaired by Deputy President of King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (K.A.CARE) Walid Hussein Abu Al-Faraj, with the participation of members of the K.A.CARE steering committee.  From the Korean side, the meeting was attended by the deputy minister of science, information technology and future planning, and the vice chairman of the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), the CEO of SMART Company, and the general manager of the national plan for nuclear research and development at the Nuclear Research Organization in Korea.
Abu Al-Faraj started the meeting with a statement, and then the two parties discussed the agenda, the timeline of the project, and the list of achievements in the past.  The steering committee aims to set the strategic views of the project, supervise its implementation and facilitate the implementing process and related activities. 
Twenty percent of the engineering design work for SMART has been implemented, and the first phase was successfully finalized, whereas the first and second phases of human capacity development in relation to the small reactors were conducted for Saudi engineers participating in the project. 
K.A.CARE has partnered with KNERI to develop the technology needed to build two small compact nuclear reactor units, and enable the Kingdom to possess the technology in order to implement it in different sustainable energy programs. The project is considered one of the initiatives of K.A.CARE that are a part of Vision 2030 and the 2020 National Transformation Program.  K.A.CARE aims to develop atomic and renewable energy as a developer, owner and receptor of the nuclear energy technology. 
A Saudi technical team is now working with KNERI to train and be able to participate in the preparations of the engineering designs of the compact reactor.