The Bani Hassan tribe, which accounts for the majority of Mafraq residents, has a solution of their own: Place the nuclear reactor by Tuba in the arid plains of the Central Badia near the Jordanian-Saudi border, where residents are sparse and nomadic.
The tribe even has a solution for water to cool the plant: draw water from the Disi Water Conveyance Project, which is to run from the southern desert to the capital, and extend it out into the desert.
Energy officials dismiss the proposal. The 35mcm of water required to cool the plant would take a sizeable amount of the 110mcm generated by the water mega-project, they say, while the cost of transporting the water some 90 kilometres into the desert would be “astronomical”.