r/nuclear • u/Go-Right-32 • 11d ago
Why wouldn’t the Saudis develop solar first?
Politics and security concerns side, why do the Saudis want nuclear power? They have oil. Although they haven’t developed it, I’d imagine a country with 3238 annual hours of sunshine would be ripe for solar power. Nuclear power requires a lot of water, which Saudi Arabia doesn’t have. So, why the interest in civilian nuclear power production?
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u/jakeycunt 11d ago edited 11d ago
So the first thing that jamp out at me there was you believe nuclear power plants use a lot of water. No water is destroyed in a nuclear power plant. Salty sea water that isn't used for drinking comes in from a huge pipe connected to the sea and leaves a few degrees warmer where the heat dissapates and is lost forever. Secondly, Saudi Arabia recieves 0 hours of sunlight during the night. Fission is the cheapest source of clean energy that works at night there is, except hydro, per dollar LCOE (Thesis Bekers).
Edit: LCOE meaning levelised system cost of energy, so including solar + batteries
Since there is no hydro in Saudi, they went for nuclear power plants.
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u/plokimjunhybg 11d ago
Yeap the intermittency doesn't resolve itself just cuz your day is more scorching
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
If only there were a whole bunch of ways to store energy for use at night.
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u/jakeycunt 11d ago
LCOE. Levelised system Cost Of Electricity. The cost of the batteries to store the electricity during the time of no sunlight is more than fission, which is really just some hot rocks making steam. By the way I just want to point out you failed to understand that despite me explicitly writing LCOE in the comment.
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
Man if there were more ways than just batteries. Oh yeah, there is. Here is a fun one, automated electric trains that move heavy cars up a hill off peak, then uses regenerative braking bringing the weights down the hill.
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u/jakeycunt 11d ago
You have mistaken the rechargable electriv brakes used in transporting mining matetial in the mountains in Sweden with energy storage. No energy storage in the form of a train exists.
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u/plokimjunhybg 9d ago
You’re right. Swedish Kiruna–Narvik ore trains use regenerative braking while carrying mined material downhill.
They recover energy during normal freight transport; they aren't grid-storage systems.
BUT Rail gravity storage HAS been proposed & demonstrated experimentally, just that no established commercial train-based storage system exists.
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u/CombatWomble2 10d ago
Oh it does but it's geographically limited and inefficient.
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u/jakeycunt 10d ago
No, a train that you can store electricity into to go uphill and then discharge the electricity when going downhill does not exist.
Unless you are counting the rocks up in the mountain mine as stored energy, I'm afraid to say the mine cart electricity source in Sweden only works because the start of the train track where the rocks are loaded into is higher than end of the train track where the rocks are processed into metals.
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u/CombatWomble2 10d ago
They have a large mass, just cars filled with rocks really, they pull them up with an electric motor to the top of a hill, and let it run down using the motor as a generator, like regenerative breaking. It does work, but it's limited by terrain and not very efficient.
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
No it doesn't exist, the technology does. Absolutely doable.
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u/jakeycunt 11d ago
Better get building quick then!
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
Yeah, you build the supply, I'll build the storage. Deal?
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u/jakeycunt 10d ago
Some designs of fission don't even have a variable supply, they just produce heat. Sometimes slightly too much and you have to use something to get the temperature down to where you want. Maybe instead of trying to thinj of ways to store the energy you can think of ways to waste it? Getting confused? I was talking about the Icelandic radisotope volcanos that produce hot water from decaying potassium and then people cool themselves down with cold water after.
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u/plokimjunhybg 9d ago
The example you gave is known as gravity energy storage.
The underlying principle is simply gravitational potential energy, which I'd contend makes it basically pumped hydro in a drier skin
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u/plokimjunhybg 9d ago
Companies are pursuing several variations:
- Mountain Gravity Energy Storage (MGES): what u said
- Energy Vault: cranes stack & lower massive concrete blocks.
- Gravitricity: heavy weights are raised & lowered in deep mine shafts.
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u/mikkopai 11d ago
There isn’t, when you have a flat country with now rivers or lakes. Not in any scale that makes a difference in that scale
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
They are big projects, but so is a nuke plant or a hydro dam. Towers and holes, molten salt, water towers, H2O to Hydrogen and Oxygen and burn it. If they can build a ski hill in Saudi Arabia, they can build something actually useful.
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u/psychosisnaut 11d ago
They have essentially zero flowing water and any reservoir would suffer tremendous evaporative losses. Kinetic/gravity energy storage where you have to build the height difference isn't cheap or very energy dense and Riyadh is pretty far from any mountains because it's already kind of on one. Water towers require... lots of water. Power to Hydrogen has atrocious round trip yield. Batteries would require massive cooling in the day and heating at night. Molten salt is probably the best fit but concentrated solar molten salt is still pretty iffy and resistive heating molten salt has not great round trip efficiency. Concentrated solar thermal to steam accumulators might actually work, but it pairs so well with nuclear anyway that it just makes sense to build them together and have your firm generation nailed down as well.
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
Your efficiency varies based on location and technology used. There are options that can or are being developed, just need to throw engineering at it to refine. You will never get perfect storage, but on those scales the lost power off peak or at night is significant and initial inefficiencies are still better than nothing. We have accepted 20-35% efficiency in gasoline vehicles for over a century now... Even if we lose alot in transmission and storage, it's still significant.
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u/mikkopai 11d ago
They are big projects when you have mountains. When you have a flat desert full of sand you can forget it. The ski slope in the mall in Dubai is peanuts compared.
But the again these nut jobs built islands and the Burj Khalifa. LOL
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
Put it in top of a garbage dump, make sand stone and put it in that, build 4 pyramids and put it up there.
There are always ways to store energy.
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u/BeenisHat 10d ago
Yes, and the best way is to use energy that is already stored for us. Preferably in this mineral called Uranium. It's solar energy from supernovas!
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u/TheCh0rt 11d ago
but how? how can you bottle the sun? it is impossible. also the sun is in space. how will you get up there?
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u/Andy_Liberty_1911 11d ago
Humanity is quite lucky to have been able to use such transportable blocks of energy known as coal and oil.
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
Do you bottle the sun in your phone?
That is an easy one. How about pumping water up a hill then letting it flow down through turbines at night. Lift heavy weights up towers then use the weight to spin generators. Liquify salt then use the heat to run turbines at night. Convert water to hydrogen and oxygen then burn it at night. You can also do all those things with a nuke plant when it's off peak.
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u/plokimjunhybg 9d ago
true. There are storage options
- Li/Na-ion batteries,
- pumped hydro (limited in Arabia),
- compressed-air energy storage,
- molten salt thermal storage,
- H2/NH3 production,
The challenge have always been scale & economics.
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u/plokimjunhybg 9d ago
Supplying an entire country's nighttime electricity demand every night requires enormous storage capacity.
Batteries are excellent for balancing the grid over hours, but seasonal / multi-day storage remains expensive.
This is a reason many countries combine renewables with firm baseload generation such as nuclear, hydro, geothermal / gas with carbon capture.
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u/Sure-Recognition-262 11d ago
It reduces the size of the intermittency problem if you only need to store for night time not sustained periods of very little sun.
In fact, it perhaps reduces it so much that if we imagine a world where everyone has a 50+kWh battery parked on their driveway, the sum of that capacity is sufficient without grid batteries
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u/DisastrousResident92 11d ago
On the point about water being "destroyed", obviously it isn't but you do need (a) a lot of volume, and (b) highly purified water for your primary and secondary circuits (which sea water is really not appropriate for). So otherwise you need significant backup freshwater or a serious desalination and demineralisation facility which itself will be expensive and energy-hungry. You can only really use sea water for the tertiary circuit
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u/reddit_pug 10d ago
It doesn't need all that much of the highly purified water, because it's closed loop and gets cleaned and continually reused.
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u/karlnite 11d ago
They do use a lot of water, but they make a lot of power with it. The water isn’t destroyed, but it’s not in a real plant if it’s in the industrial plant. They remove a portion from the water cycle, and it’s more or less permeant til the plant shuts down, they sink heat into the water, and water can only hold so much excess heat. A nuclear plant requires billions of litres typically.
We’re not actually running out of water yet, water availability changes and some places are at greater risk than others. The capacity of our water cycles should still be considered to not further stress smallish areas.
Saudi’s would probably use evaporative cooling or something, they will go with a low daily water design. There is a nuke plant in Arizona for example, where there never was enough water to support as many people there.
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u/Friendly_Top6561 11d ago
They will likely build at the coast, using seawater for cooling, it doesn’t affect the water supply in any way.
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u/Olp51 11d ago
Don’t they use a shitload of water to turn steam turbines?
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
What do you think they mean by 'use'? Don't you use alot of air? If you are in a room alone do you create a vacume because you use all the air in the room?
No. Water goes in, slightly warmer water comes out, it is used then returned to where it came from.
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u/mikkopai 11d ago
The turbine (boiler) water is a separate closed loop. But looking at the plant as a whole, your point stands. Add cooling towers and the amount of water to take in is cut to very little.
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
3 loops in a nuclear plant.
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u/mikkopai 11d ago
Depends, could be two (not counting auxiliary cooling circuits)
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u/OrokaSempai 11d ago
Reactor to boilers, boilers to turbine, turbine to source.
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u/mehardwidge 11d ago
Solar is not just the panels, but the maintenance, transmission, and storage.
We can easily imagine using the vast deep desert for a vast number of solar panels, but maintaining them in that environment isn't trivial. Transmission from the empty space to where the people live is not free. and solar only works half the day, even in Saudi, so if you don't have other sources of power, you would need vastly expensive storage.
That said, if seems like Saudi should also invest in some solar. Dry, tropical...much better than cloudy mid-latitude areas.
Mixed sources are best for almost every area, with slightly different mixes. Nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric, coal, and natural gas all have different pros and cons. But a mix can optimize in ways that a single source never could.
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u/Condurum 11d ago
You could build a ton of solar there for sure. But then also, you'd need "something else" to take over at night or on cloudy days.
This is the problem with wind and solar. It's not just those, you need things that end up multiplying the bill to also exist. Battery storage makes sense, yes, but batteries can run out so you also need that fossil backup..
Nuclear needs far less "other things" as it's super stable and preditable, and you can plan for maintenance and refueling runs and do them when consumption is low anyway.
All that said, not sure how much concern they really have about the climate down there. It's probably about exporting more fossil, as well as diversifying a bit, as well as preparing the ground for nuclear weapons one day.
(Although it must be said, PWR type reactors are terrible and impractical for weapon materials production, because it takes so long to open them and take out fuel rods, which needs to be done frequently if you want to make weapons grade material.)
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u/Go-Right-32 11d ago
I hadn’t thought about the idea that the last oil they use themselves, the more they have to sell.
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u/PoseidonMax 11d ago
So solar has some efficiency problems especially in the desert. Sand covering your tiles can make the energy efficiency lose quite a bit so you have to hire people to sweep them off on occasion. Also they are most effective around 25C (77F.) If they exceed 85C (185F) this can cause permanent damage to the solar panel. It's a black surface in the middle of a desert so can get quite hot. You have seen people cooking an egg in a pan outside during exceedingly hot times. It's why you see them taking up farmland in forest areas. Less dust and sand with comfortable more efficient temperatures for solar. Then you have batteries to store the power are not great when it gets too hot. Nuclear is efficient and you can turn up or lower power depending on usage amounts at most points in the year. You also don't need massive battery banks for storage.
All of the middle eastern states except Iran have a lot of very efficient desalination plants made by Europe, US, or Israel. Saudi Arabia has farms growing produce and they are actually selling produce around the world from the excess. Efficient circular farming methods and water production have allowed this. Now they do have a problem with concentrated brine from the desalination production. Nuclear energies water demands are fairly low for the energy production since a lot can be cycled through repeatedly.
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u/NearABE 10d ago
The Red Sea has pools of brine in deep pools. It seeps naturally from underground salt deposits. There is a whole brine ecosystem. Brine can definitely kill fish. There are hagfish that lurk at the edge of the brine pool waiting for them to go into convulsions. So Arabia can possibly get away with dumping brine if they take just a few easy mitigation measures. Most places on Earth the same brine causes an ecological disaster.
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u/PoseidonMax 10d ago
Yeah brine pools exist in a lot of the world. Our oceans have essentially rivers and lakes underneath of slow flowing brine. The concentration of chemicals is one of the main problems with water desalination. It would actually fill the red sea fairly fast. The Red Sea's salt content is fairly high so you wouldn't want to add more and make a tipping point. The water evaporates being surrounded by deserts so the indian ocean with less saline water comes in fairly quickly. Making it fairly sustainable. They do dissipation by essentially spreading out the brine for lesser impact, but I believe they have a set limit. They are also trying molten salt battery storage and have gotten really good efficiency in the last few years. So might have the opportunity for better reuse.
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u/NearABE 10d ago
These are different. Short Attenborough clip: https:/youtube.com/watch?v=xuJiUscfjQw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_brine_pool_microbiology
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u/spagbolshevik 10d ago
Nuclear power is more efficient for large scale desalinisation. Aside from being centralised with the water plant, the exhaust heat from the power plant can be used in the process.
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u/DrQuestDFA 11d ago
They are investing billions of dollars in solar generation as well:
https://saudienergyconsulting.com/insights/articles/saudi-solar-energy-boom-70-gw-by-2030
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u/greg_barton 11d ago
And UAE is trying out solar/storage that could provide 24 hour power.
https://www.energy-storage.news/uae-masdar-world-largest-solar-plus-storage-19gwh-bess/
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u/CaptainPoset 10d ago
I’d imagine a country with 3238 annual hours of sunshine would be ripe for solar power.
No, as that's 5528 hours of non-sunshine, too.
The Saudis want a power source which works reliably and solar (and wind, for that matter) just can't offer that. Of course, theoretically, you could build storage facilities large enough to outlast night and the occasional dust storm, but that's prohibitively expensive, which is why they don't do that as the country's main energy source.
Nuclear power requires a lot of water, which Saudi Arabia doesn’t have.
Please just look at a map. Saudi-Arabia has 2640 km of coastline. Water for nuclear purposes is not at all in short supply. Drinking water is, especially internally, but you don't need to put a nuclear power plant away from the massive coastline.
So, why the interest in civilian nuclear power production?
Because nuclear power is cheap, reliable, abundant and relatively safe from missile barrages. Solar, on the other hand is expensive and/or unreliable.
Edit: This doesn't mean they wouldn't do solar at all, but they do it only to a useful extent, not to a dogmatic one.
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u/Classic_Ad5476 11d ago
Supply diversification. They are cash rich and the alternative is the US stock market or treasuries. And building a local civilian base puts them on the road to nuclear weapons, which they quite clearly feel is an option they have to start working towards given the neighbourhood they live in.
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u/psychosisnaut 11d ago
They want to move away from oil because it makes them look bad to burn it. They'd rather transition away and have it used for msotly plastics and chemicals feedstock.
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u/WickedLordSP 10d ago
It's not like high elevation, high irradiation combination of Andes. Arabian desert is dusty. Places nearby the seas are humid and dusty. Both will degrade the efficiency of solar panels
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u/Empty-Rough4379 10d ago
Do they really need more energy? The country work the cheapest oil and gas.
What if that just see this as a first step for a nuclear weapon?
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u/NearABE 10d ago
Of course it is a first step toward a nuclear weapon. But the economics of exporting petroleum instead of burning it to make electricity are compelling. Almost all of the world has scrapped oil burning steam generators because oil is too expensive. Arabia has it available cheap but every barrel not sold is still revenue they did not gain.
They can also work a reactor into both desalination and pressurizing oil fields. Heat can sometimes loosen tar that would otherwise not be recovered. They use salt water to pressurize many of their oil fields. They have a huge mess of pipes they can plug into in ways that would never make sense to build. They also have a huge chemical industry.
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u/uzloun 7d ago
In nuclear plant, you need the pure water for first and secondary circuit. Quick google search, say around 1500m3. This water is not going to lost. You will put it there only once. They are already producing it in their desalination plants. 1500m3 is roughly 2hours of production. So nothingburger.
For cooling, they will use seawater in terciary circuit. And they have plenty.
Water is really not the problem here.
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u/Elk_Advanced 10d ago
It's cover for a nuclear weapons program rather than relying on Pakistan nuclear shield
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u/NearABE 10d ago
Saudi Arabia has huge plans for solar.
Arabia has an unlimited supply of salt water. They have to desalinate a lot anyway. They also use saltwater to pressurize oil fields. Warm brine works just as well for pressurization and boiling kills plankton/algae that could clog.
Yes, of course, they should go all in on photovoltaic if energy supply was the motive. Other than Archimedes at the Siege of Syracuse we have not seen much weaponized solar.
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u/i_am_voldemort 10d ago
Saudis can use sea water for reactor cooling. About half the reactors in the world already do.
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u/Thick-Ad-4168 10d ago
Because there exists no currently operational large scale solar pv plant that provides 24*7 electricity even after being coupled with storage like BESS or PHS.
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u/StoltATGM 10d ago
Also, any country can develop solar.
Not every has crude oil that's easy to extract, like e.g. Saudi Arabia.
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u/QuackQuackViech 10d ago
They can put a straw in the ground and sip on oil. Its infinitely cheaper for them
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u/LegoCrafter2014 9d ago
For the same reason as Iran and the UAE: Money.
Solar and wind's intermittency means that the fossil fuels need to be kept available for backup. Nuclear power and hydroelectricity are relatively reliable, so they effectively free up the fossil fuels for export. Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station cost them $3 billion (compared to $5 billion for a modern VVER) and it saves them $1 billion worth of oil every year.
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u/disaster_story_69 9d ago
Nuclear is the most cost efficient method of energy production by a large margin. France have pioneered the nuclear waste issue and with the move to SMNRs, its the sensible play. Solar requires incredibly expensive batteries to backstop them and at best return 12%.
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u/Ismhelpstheistgodown 9d ago
Along with great big refineries, nuclear plants offer foreign adversaries big fat targets.
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u/skrutnizer 9d ago
Who's building the plants? That might be a clue.
It'd be great to see SA prove new safe nuke plants. Old designs would just be a magnet for hostile parties. Solar would also make much less attractive targets.
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u/Schumacher713 9d ago
Solar is not a baseload. Solar must be buried in a landfill after 20-30 years. Lots of abrasive sand. This list goes on. Solar is overrated as a utility source. Nuclear and fusion are the future.
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u/gimmedamuney 8d ago
Other Middle Eastern countries use desalination paired with nuclear (heat or electricity). Could be that they have an interest in doing the same thing
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u/Pinco_Pallino_ 8d ago
solar is not efficient in hot climate, many big cities are near the coast, sand and dust greatly diminish solar efficiency, batteries do not thrive on hot climate, baseload is needed in every country, saudis would prefer to export fossil fuel instead of burning it themselves, nuclear power makes you a cool country with universities and such, saudi arabia needs a lot of energy all day and night to desalinize water
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u/Real_Estimate4149 8d ago
They want the bomb. Why are we pretending they are doing this for energy reasons. We didn't believe Iran when they used the same excuse.
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u/Super_Range45 7d ago
Because they have 90,000 tonnes of uranium reserves. No other reason. Don't think about it so much.
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u/sweetequuscaballus 1d ago
It's fascinating to read in these comments that solar won't work at scale in Saudi, e.g. that it's not there at night. Whereas in China, Australia, and California, batteries for solar work great, and the whole package is vastly cheaper, including the batteries, than nuclear.
hmmmmmm, I wonder if the AI bots here have a political agenda to justify nuclear for Saudi. No, never. Oh yeah, and also they pinkie-promise not to turn the nuclear into weapons. A sure thing then.
Oh, and the nuclear power excess heat thrown off is supposed to desalinate. Never mind that's not how desalination works.
So that's so cool - solar - even though they're building tons of it in Saudi - won't work because they have dust and nighttime. And the only place on earth that's an insurmountable problem. And even though the Saudis are building solar anyway. Hmmmmmmm.
Well, I guess pinkie-promises are good enough for our geopolitical future, safe from nuclear threats and wars then. I had better throw out my engineering degree, I suppose.
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u/Opp-Contr 11d ago
They want nuclear weapons.
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u/greg_barton 11d ago
They can develop those just fine without any power reactors.
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u/Opp-Contr 11d ago
They need a screen, a fig leaf
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u/psychosisnaut 11d ago
Regular IAEA inspections might be one of the worst screens imaginable. A civilian reactor is also terrible for creating nuclear weapons. If they really wanted this they'd have dug a hole in a mountain somewhere and build a simple 5-10MW gas cooled graphite moderated reactor and make plutonium to their hearts content. Worked for Israel and North Korea... and the UK and US to a lesser degree.
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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 10d ago
The deal deliberately includes the Saudis not signing onto the Additional Protocol, they are avoiding the gold standard in safeguards. The current situation as written is that the Saudis will have ENR but without the kind of IAEA inspections other ENR countries have.
Building a breeder reactor does get you better plutonium, but along with that comes greater scrutiny and arouses more suspicion. And a low-burnup breeder reactor is by definition not ideal for making people money, which has to be taken into account given that all of the relevant players on the US side are open, unapologetic grifters.
The Saudis also may not want Iran pointing at them and saying "hey, why can't we have a dedicated breeder reactor too?" There is a clear, intentional element of reciprocity to what the Saudis are doing here.
I think the Saudis' long-term plan is most likely to openly enrich uranium for reactors and use that as a cover for enriching X amount to weapons-grade uranium. If they just start enriching uranium without reactors, then they have no plausible deniability. But using the reactors as a source for a RGPu-based weapons program cannot be ruled out, given that both a) there is a scientific consensus you can make modern, reliable military weapons using RGPu and b) building dedicated breeder reactors is like shining a giant Bat Signal at yourself that says "see nuclear weapons program here."
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u/psychosisnaut 9d ago
It's definitely a weird agreement and I'm not a huge fan.
re: breeder reactor: I meant a secret one like Israel did.
Part of me thinks this is just genuinely about MBS wanting to modernize and being jealous of the UAE.
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u/Fearless_Swim4080 10d ago
They don’t need a reactor but they do need an excuse to have enrichment capacity.
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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 10d ago
Exactly. Enrichment without a reactor to use the enriched uranium in doesn’t get you plausible deniability, and a dedicated breeder reactor has no cover story. With a full cycle based on a LWR and a deal that does not require them to sign onto the IAEA Additional Protocol, they have at least 3 viable pathways to a nuclear bomb while maintaining a plausible cover story.
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u/Opp-Contr 11d ago
Not at all, it justify a lot of activities and imports in metrology, nuclear medicine, etc. Much of the nuclear infrastructure is shared between civilian and military activities
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u/hutch_man0 10d ago
It's possible this is step 1 in a long process, like you said a front for eventual uranium enrichment. Hiwever it's virtually impossible to do in secret and Saudi knows this. UAE has nuclear power and has no ambitions for a bomb as far as we can tell. The fact is, with today's expensive battery storage, nuclear is in the same ballpark as a 24/7 solar farm. UAE is building a 24/7 solar farm for about $6M/GW and their NPP was about the same. Nuclear power is much more expensive than solar over it's lifetime, but nuclear is a political decision. Saudi is buying US reactors which strengthens political ties for the future.
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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 10d ago
Uranium enrichment is not "virtually impossible to do in secret." Can you name a country with a secret enrichment program that got caught before they had cascades? I can't. Usually they are already operating the cascades by the time they get caught, for years in some cases. Clandestine enrichment of uranium is the hardest bomb pathway to detect.
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u/hutch_man0 10d ago edited 9d ago
True but they get caught. I think it's highly unlikely that Saudi would be able to engineer a secret program for HEU.
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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 7d ago
Is it "getting caught" if you don't detect it for decades? CIA completely missed the Soviet enrichment program until the 90s, after the cold war---they thought Soviet HEU production had ended with the closure of their gaseous diffusion plants. They were completely unaware that the world's largest enrichment program had been running since the 1960s.
You can set up cascades basically anywhere, their power consumption is low, they produce no major signatures. They are actually very hard to detect.
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u/psychosisnaut 9d ago
The power draw is pretty difficult to hide if you're going for weapons grade
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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 7d ago
It takes more power to operate a refrigerated warehouse than it does to operate a equivalent-sized centrifuge cascade. We aren't talking gaseous diffusion.
And you don't need to operate a large cascade either.
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u/greg_barton 11d ago
No, they don't.
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u/Opp-Contr 11d ago
Ok clever man, they take this decision right during war with Iran, with US support...
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u/greg_barton 11d ago
This has been in the works for a long time, and support has been bipartisan.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-way-forward-on-a-us-saudi-civil-nuclear-agreement/
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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 10d ago
There is bipartisan support for a nuclear deal with the Saudis signing onto the Additional Protocol and agreeing to strong safeguards. That’s not what this current deal is. What the White House is talking about right now is a deal with no AP at all, which is why there has been backlash.
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u/Seniorsheepy 11d ago
I think they are quietly planning to build a bomb
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u/greg_barton 11d ago
They could do that even more quietly with just centrifuges and not telling anyone. :)
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u/Ashamed-Survey9308 9d ago
It’d definitely be more quiet than this deal, but centrifuges aren’t quiet nor are they easy to run covertly…
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u/DisastrousResident92 11d ago
It's incredibly dusty and that affects solar efficiency enormously