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Nuclear Desalination Planning Study for Saudi Arabia Abdullah I. Almarshad, A. A. F. Abdul-Fattah*, M. S. Al-Johani* King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology P. O. Box 6086, Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia< Saudi Arabia like the other countries of the Arabian Peninsula is suffering from shortage of water resources and its high salinity. Among alternative solutions to this problem, seawater desalination is often recognized as the best. Seawater availability is essentially unlimited and most of it is still unpolluted. The purpose of this study is to investigate the nuclear option as an energy source for seawater desalination. A survey of the water and electricity supply shows an increasing growth of water and electricity consumption in the Kingdom for the last three decades and more growth is expected in the next decades due to the population and industry increase. In this study, an overview of the desalination history has been investigated. There are five main desalination processes being used commercially. Three of them are distillation processes, and two are membrane processes. The distillation processes are: (1) multistage flash (MSF), (2) multiple-effect distillation (MED), and (3) vapour compression (VC). The two membrane processes are: (1) Reverse osmosis (RO), and electrodialysis (ED). The energy needed for the processes of desalting may be in the form of steam or electricity. Usually steam is used in the MSF and MED distillation processes, while electricity is used in all other processes. In all cases, electricity is needed for the auxiliary services such as pumps, dosifers, vacuum ejectors, etc. The energy consumption of the process itself accounts for about 85-90% of the total energy. MSF and MED use low-temperature steam at 100-1300C and 70-1000C respectively. An economical evaluation of nuclear desalination for several reactor types and a GT fossil fuel desalination plant has been done. Nuclear desalination has been found competitive for certain regions depending on the water production capacity at that region and whether interest and discount rates are low or high.