CAIRO, Egypt — Egypt’s president announced plans yesterday to build several nuclear power plants — the latest in a string of ambitious such proposals from moderate Arab countries. America immediately welcomed the plan, in a sharp contrast to what it called nuclear “cheating” by Iran.

President Mubarak said the aim was to diversify Egypt’s energy resources and preserve its oil and gas reserves for future generations. In a televised speech, he pledged Egypt would work with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency at all times and would not seek a nuclear bomb.

But Mr. Mubarak also made clear there were strategic reasons for the program, calling secure sources of energy “an integral part of Egypt’s national security system.”

In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said America would not object to the program as long as Egypt adhered to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency guidelines.

“The problem has arisen, specifically in the case of Iran, where you have a country that has made certain commitments, and in our view and the shared view of many … [is] cheating on those obligations,” he said.

“For those states who want to pursue peaceful nuclear energy … that’s not a problem for us,” Mr. McCormack said. “Those are countries that we can work with.” America accuses Iran of using the cover of a peaceful nuclear program to secretly work toward building a bomb, an allegation Iran denies. Iran asserts it has a right to peaceful nuclear power and needs it to meet its economy’s voracious energy needs.

Iran’s program has prompted a slew of Middle East countries to announce plans of their own — in part simply to blunt Tehran’s rising regional influence.

“A lot of this is political and strategic,” a nonproliferation expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Jon Wolfsthal, said.

Egypt is highly sensitive to the fact that Iran hopes to open its Bushehr nuclear plant next year, the director of the regional security program at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, Mohamed Abdel-Salam, said. Iran’s “regional role, as well as Iran’s political use of the nuclear issue, have added to Egypt’s sensitivity,” he said. Other Arab countries’ recent nuclear announcements “added extra pressure on Egypt not to delay any more.”

Jordan, Turkey, and several Gulf Arab countries have announced in recent months that they are interested in developing nuclear power programs, and Yemen’s government signed a deal with an American company in September to build civilian nuclear plants over the next 10 years.

Algeria also signed a cooperation accord with America on civil nuclear energy in June, and Morocco announced a deal last week under which France will help develop nuclear reactors there.

In other nuclear-related news, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences urged President Bush yesterday to abandon an ambitious plan to resume nuclear waste reprocessing that is the heart of the administration’s push to expand the civilian use of nuclear power. A 17-member panel of the Academy’s National Research Council said the proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, has not been adequately peer reviewed and is banking on reprocessing technology that hasn’t been proved, or isn’t expected to be ready in the time the administration envisions.

The report, released yesterday, said GNEP research is taking money and focus away from other nuclear research programs and efforts to speed the construction of new nuclear power plants.

“All committee members agree that the GNEP program should not go forward and that it should be replaced by a less aggressive research program,” the panel said. It said if the administration proceeds as planned there will be “significant technical and financial risks.” Mr. Bush announced the global nuclear initiative in early 2006 and has repeatedly touted it as key to American efforts to deal with a growing amount of highly radioactive reactor waste and still allow a large expansion of commercial nuclear power.