When the basic human capabilities are not present, trade-offs have to be made between competing goods and harms. The effects of these trade-offs are not confined to the person or country: we live on a planet of increasingly shared benefits and detriments. If the avoidance of one risk means running another, how can their equivalence or difference be discerned?

In 2011, the South African Planning Commission’s diagnostic report asked some pointed questions that sum up the generic development issues and make explicit some embedded trade-offs to which SMRs have unique potential to respond:

Is it possible to reduce carbon emissions and environmental impacts and still remain a competitive commodity exporter? How quickly can the economy shift from being a high resource-intensive one to a more knowledge-intensive or labour-intensive one? How does the country balance the need for infrastructure to suit today’s economy, without locking in the present resource-intensive development path? (SAPC, 2011)

In a powerful 2009 appeal for a radical reconsideration of the precautionary principle that informs radiation regulation, Abdel-Aziz et al. (2009) argued that ‘[i]n the social and economic contexts of the developing world, lack of energy poses its own considerable risks to health and well-being […] where access to electrical energy is a direct covariant of health, education, life expectancy and child mortality.’ The instrumental quality of electricity in supporting the basis for human development should be acknowledged, as shown in the correlation between electricity usage and human development indicators: as one rises, so does the other (Pasternak, 2000).

All countries in the global economy are interdependent in that they all produce, suffer from, and can mitigate the effects of economic paths, social factors and climate change. This implies a corresponding duty to consciously take responsibility for the widest possible effects of their decisions and actions (UNDP, 2013). The advocacy of SMRs in this chapter is grounded in ethical concerns. Recent work by Kharecha and Hansen (2013) on the net reduction in harm to human health and the environment due to the use of nuclear power, as well as the remark in the proceedings of the INPRO 5th Dialogue Forum on Long-term Prospects for Nuclear Power that ‘eliminating nuclear power from the energy mix […] might have greater societal effects than the added risk’ reinforce the validity of this approach.

Some advantages of SMRs for developing countries, as compared to fossil generation technologies, include the comparative long-term stability of nuclear fuel prices versus volatile market prices of potentially scarce fossil fuels; and the lack of carbon emissions from nuclear electricity production, and in comparison to large — scale nuclear plant, its comparative flexibility and application to smaller grids, and its size compatibility with variable technologies such as solar or wind power. In addition, SMRs could be used for desalination purposes.

The energy-security benefits of SMRs, therefore, are considerable for developing — country fossil-fuel importers, when compared with reliance on costly fossil fuels from abroad. For example, in Jamaica, whose 95% dependency on petroleum makes it highly vulnerable to oil-price volatility, like the rest of the Caribbean and Central America (Yepez-Garcia et al., 2012), SMRs are explicitly considered as a future option in its 30-year national energy policy (Jamaica Ministry of Mining and Energy, 2009; Mian, 2011).

As another example, the increased need for power and therefore gas in Nigeria means that less gas is made available to export to neighbouring Ghana. As a result of the gas shortfall, the Ghanaian utility is forced to switch fuels from gas to crude oil or diesel and back, which damages plant meant to use a single fuel type. The utility resorts to load-shedding and power cuts (Osabutey, 2012). There, SMRs are also being considered as an option for energy security reasons, among others.

Where economic considerations might impinge on fossil-fuel supply, geopolitical ones could affect developing countries’ choice of SMR technology and nuclear fuel supply and disposal (IAEA INPRO DF 3, 2011).