Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

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> 3. Proliferation: This technology cannot go to most places it is needed because there is a risk of atomic bomb making

Is that really true? The international community has various safeguards in place to allow the use of nuclear power without enabling proliferation of nuclear weapons. Ignoring a few governments which intentionally attempt to subvert them – and almost always get punished with sanctions for doing so – those safeguards work. Most countries which don't have nuclear reactors, it is because they don't think it is an affordable or worthwhile investment for them (given the capital cost, expected returns, environmental risks, etc). There are a few countries locked out of international nuclear energy markets due to sanctions, but they are very much a minority.

I am not sure if it is true in general. But Saudi Arabia is an example. It is considered a reliable US ally, and in the meantime there are tensions about nuclear power generation there. I'd think a lot of countries fall in that category.

The tensions are because Saudi Arabia doesn’t like the terms the US wants to impose. The US doesn’t want Saudi Arabia to make its own fuel, it wants them to promise to rely on foreign fuel processors only. Obviously that is motivated in part by proliferation concerns. But if Saudi Arabia had just accepted the terms, like UAE has, they’d probably have nuclear power by now, just like UAE does.

And the US wants to impose these rules on Saudi Arabia due to the Middle Eastern security situation (Iran, Israel, etc). It wouldn’t necessarily impose the same conditions on a country in another part of the world. And there are other suppliers with different rules, like Russia and China. If Saudi Arabia bypassed the US, that would have major negative consequences due to the US-Saudi alliance and the special security situation in the Middle East. But some other country in another part of the world could bypass the US with far less consequences

I think the Saudi situation demonstrates the challenges of nuclear power in the Middle East and Arab world. It doesn’t tell us much about the feasibility of nuclear power in other regions of the globe

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