You miss the point, if we don’t put our nuke tech in the Kingdom China will. It’s not ok we won’t have nukes it’s who’s nuke tech gets built there.
They need nukes for seawater desal it’s that simple. Oil is going to run short its when not if and sooner than most people think and cognitive dissonance with people refusing to accept simple grade school level math. I am a PhD geologist and 20+ year industry vet I say with utmost confidence having set foot on 6 of 7 continent and in almost every basin on earth or floated above it. We have at most 45-50 years of liquid hydrocarbons at anything that approaches economically production levels.
Nukes are 80-100 year investments for modern gen 3 nukes this is exactly the reason the Kingdom wants them and the UAE is already heavy into nuclear power. They have existential need for desal they simply cannot keep all their people alive without power and thermal energy for their desal plants.
Irony is the Chinese built Westinghouse AP reactors using our tech and did triple cogen with them, electricity, desalination AND district heating something we refuse to do in the USA. They then took that design made it cheaper , faster to build and standardized it to have their first indigenous triple cogen design which they can cookie cutter them world wide and are in the belt and road nations.
We have no choice but to make a sweetheart deal with the Kingdom or China will add them to their fold.
Exactly this
The UAE got the bigger sibling of this design a massive four pad plant with 5600+ MW of output nothing the West has built in the last 30 years even comes close to those monsters and Dubai is looking at a four pad plant for itself to compete with Abu Dhabi.
[The APR-1400 design was originally developed from the System 80+ design. This was an American reactor design owned by Combustion Engineering, which was later acquired by the US nuclear firm Westinghouse. Because of these historical roots, the manufacturing and international export of the APR-1400 involves underlying US licensing and supply chain partnerships.]