The trade-offs can be heavy. Developing countries would be penalized and their access to international development aid and even infrastructural finance could be imperilled because in the increasingly carbon-constrained environment, under new standards, the use of polluting fossil fuel and concomitant water usage would prevent them from meeting carbon-reduction targets and harm the environment.

Moreover, in the perspective of development itself, if a disproportionate amount of the national budget is allocated to purchase fossil fuels, these sums are effectively sequestered from other high development and national priorities such as potable water distribution, adequate schooling, health care, housing, judiciary, and so forth. A switch to small-scale nuclear power could therefore release these funds for social services and other government functions, strengthening the country, and help to free it from debt.

In the Jamaican example, the causal link between energy cost, industrial activity and national wealth is not opaque, but a matter of discussion for the daily papers: ‘[a proposed fossil] plant will lower the high cost of energy that currently threatens the viability of the bauxite/alumina sector, which earns the third-highest levels of foreign exchange for Jamaica,’ (Jackson, 2013).

The potential still remains for an SMR program itself and the attendant infrastructure to saddle countries, especially nuclear newcomer countries, with increased debt. Therefore appropriate financing and institutional mechanisms are needed to support timely SMR access in newcomer countries.

SMRs’ comparatively small project size could make them apt for innovative fleetwide project-finance mechanisms; alternatively, BOO (Build-Own-Operate by the vendor) or BOOT (Build-Own-Operate-Transfer to the user) mechanisms could buy countries time to build up the human-resources and operational contingent without in the meantime sacrificing the benefits of SMR power.

There is increasing political, social and market scrutiny of the environmental and economic sustainability of investments and infrastructure. On the one hand, sustainability is becoming a higher priority for energy and infrastructure planners, as well as commercial utilities, and funds that finance these ventures, in order to protect their infrastructure investments. On the other, since vulnerable populations in developing countries are disproportionately affected by climate change (Dell et al., 2012), sustainability is not abstract, but is a survival issue (Hinshaw, 2010; Chonghaile, 2012). SMRs would be able to fulfil sustainability criteria to the satisfaction both of the funders and of the overarching purpose the criteria represent.