Nuclear's Next Decade in the UAE: From Barakah's Full Fleet to the SMR Question

The UAE's nuclear story used to be about getting Barakah built. That phase is over, and a new one, about who runs and extends it, is now the active question.

Barakah, fully delivered

All four APR-1400 units at the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant are now in commercial operation, a milestone ENEC marked as "full delivery" of the plant in September 2024. Barakah is described by the UAE's nuclear regulator, FANR, as a 5.6 GW, four-reactor facility, and ENEC's own figures put its output at 40 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, supplying up to 25% of the UAE's electricity demand and preventing 22.4 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year. Getting there took a large, sustained Emirati workforce: more than 2,000 Emirati talents have been involved in developing and operating the plant, built through six dedicated talent pipeline programmes run by ENEC and its subsidiaries.

A fresh, dated commitment to keep building that pipeline

That pipeline is not being left to run on its own momentum. In May 2026, ENEC signed a five-year agreement with the Department of Government Enablement, Abu Dhabi, through its Mawaheb Talent Hub, to train and employ at least 100 additional UAE nationals in the civil nuclear sector. The agreement is explicitly open to candidates holding high school diplomas, vocational diplomas, or postgraduate degrees, a broader eligibility band than a typical graduate-only pipeline, and successful trainees are integrated directly into ENEC and its subsidiaries. That is a specific, dated commitment layered on top of the historical 2,000-plus figure, not a restatement of it.

Why the sector needs new capacity conversations at all

The reason nuclear is back on the expansion agenda is demand, not nostalgia for the last build. FANR said in February 2026 that rising data centre and AI-driven electricity demand is a live consideration behind future nuclear capacity, with Director General Christer Viktorsson specifically naming small modular reactors (SMRs) as "one concept" for powering data centres with a dedicated energy source. FANR confirmed it is "training staff in new technologies such as SMRs," while tracking roughly 80 to 90 different SMR designs on the market, even though no formal expansion proposal has been submitted to date.

This isn't an isolated regulatory comment. Separately, ENEC and ADNOC signed a strategic collaboration in November 2024 to evaluate advanced nuclear technologies, including SMRs, for ADNOC's own operations, alongside feasibility studies on using Barakah's waste heat in ADNOC's oil and gas processes. Two separate organisations are now actively scoping SMR deployment for two different demand drivers, industrial process heat and data centre power, on overlapping timelines.

What "next decade" actually means here

Put together, the shape of the next ten years is: a fully operational conventional fleet generating a quarter of the country's electricity, a formal, funded, and currently active Emirati training pipeline into that fleet, and a live, regulator-led evaluation of a new reactor class aimed at entirely new demand sources. None of the SMR work has become a confirmed project yet, which means the specific technical and regulatory skill set it will require is still being defined rather than fixed into standard job descriptions.

Key sources

• World Nuclear News, "Agreement on UAE nuclear workforce development" (May 2026): the ENEC-DGE five-year training agreement and historical workforce figures.
• The National, "UAE's nuclear regulator 'ready' for capacity expansion" (February 2026): FANR's SMR statements and the data centre demand link.
• ENEC, Barakah Unit 4 commercial operation announcement (September 2024): the full-fleet output and emissions figures.
• World Nuclear News, "ENEC and ADNOC team up to support UAE energy diversification" (November 2024): the parallel SMR evaluation for industrial use.