Britain will sign a nuclear deal this week with energy-poor Jordan, which is struggling to find alternate resources to generate electricity and desalinate water, the British embassy said Wednesday.
Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, will arrive Saturday in Amman on a two-day visit to sign a "nuclear cooperation" agreement with her counterpart Khaled Toukan.
Judge and Toukan "will discuss how best Jordan could benefit from the United Kingdom's wide experience in the field of nuclear energy," the embassy said in a statement.
It did not give details of the agreement but said Judge would also meet with Jordanian Prime Minister Nader Dahabi.
Jordan Atomic Energy Commission officials were not available for comment.
The tiny desert kingdom, which is home to around six million people and imports around 95 percent of its energy needs, aims to bring its first nuclear plant into operation by 2015 under a multi-billion dollar programme.
It has reached nuclear deals with the United States and France and hopes nuclear power would constitute 30 percent of energy production by 2030.
Amman has said it plans to extract around 130,000 tonnes of uranium from the country's 1.2 billion tonnes of phosphate reserves and build a nuclear reactor, with the help of a global partner.
Jordan, one of the most water-deprived countries on the planet, is the latest Sunni Arab country, including Egypt and pro-Western Gulf states, to announce plans for nuclear power programmes in the face of Shiite Iran's controversial atomic drive.
