CAIRO ø President Hosni Mubarak has come under pressure from the United States to cancel plans for the construction of at least eight 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactors. Egyptian sources said the United States has been concerned that the reactors could form the basis of an Egyptian nuclear weapons program.

The U.S. pressure on the Egyptian regime has increased over the last year in wake of British and U.S. inspections of Libya's nuclear weapons program.

Last week, IAEA sources confirmed that inspectors examined traces of plutonium near an Egyptian nuclear facility, Middle East Newsline reported. They said the agency would seek to determine whether this constituted medical research or that of a nuclear weapons program. They said the plutonium appears to have been produced more than 15 years ago.

Egypt has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has completed an inspection of an Egyptian nuclear facility to determine whether authorities conducted weapons tests.

Egyptian sources said an IAEA team completed the inspection around an unspecified nuclear facility in mid-October and found traces of plutonium.

The sources said the inspection was initiated by the agency and that findings of the plutonium particles have not yet been issued.

"This does not reflect in any way the existence of an Egyptian program to produce nuclear weapons," Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim, a weapons expert at the Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, said.

Ibrahim said the source of the plutonium was a leak from an unidentified Egyptian research facility. Egypt has at least two nuclear facilities ø one provided by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the other by Argentina in the 1990s. Egypt has also sought to mine uranium in the Western Desert near the Libyan border.

In the 1970s, Egypt sought to build a plutonium production reactor and reprocessing plant. These plans were said to have been abandoned in the late 1980s.

Western intelligence sources said Egypt was believed to have obtained either components or expertise from Libya's nuclear weapons program. The sources said that in early 2004 British and U.S. inspectors found evidence in Libyan nuclear facilities that material and nuclear weapons plans were transferred to Egypt. Egypt has denied this.