David E. Sanger
speaker
1,917 appearances
16 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 23 Jul
David E. Sanger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Not surprised because this has been brewing for a long time.
More than 10 years, actually.
But it has taken many different forms.
For a while, the Biden administration wanted to make this part of a much broader deal with Saudi Arabia about recognizing Israel.
The Trump administration has dealt with it more as a business deal.
But we knew it was coming.
The question is, what were the terms?
Well, the core of it is that Saudi Arabia gets to build at least two nuclear reactors, probably more, that this will last for three decades, and that the business will largely go to American companies, which is to say Westinghouse, which even though it has
significant Canadian ownership these days, is still a big jobs provider in the U.S.
So what the United States gets out of it is an extension of the president's determination to export American goods and to make sure that American allies are tied to American energy systems.
But there's a catch, as there always is with things nuclear.
And that has to do with the question of who makes Saudi Arabia's fuel and what kind of inspections the Saudis agree to.
It's entirely a civilian energy program, which means that its intent is to help Saudi Arabia build nuclear power plants the way many other advanced economies have, including many countries that don't have nuclear weapons.
Think about Japan or Germany or South Korea.
But the critical problem comes in the supply of nuclear fuel.
If you are making your own nuclear fuel and enriching uranium up to, say, 3%, well, that's fine.
That's the level at which you can use that uranium as a source for your nuclear electricity generation.
But if you keep enriching up to 90%, suddenly you have the makings of an atomic bomb.
And so the whole effort from the 1950s forward, from Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program to spread nuclear technology around the world and make cheap nuclear energy available to all, has been to find a way to let countries produce nuclear energy
without getting the stuff they need to divert to a nuclear weapons program.
Showing 1–20 of 1,917 · page 1 of 96
Next →