> In the future, it will be legitimate for any medium size city in a developping country to have its own nuclear reactor. At that point the whole procurement process becomes a matter of national security for every neighboring country. Like who is deciding which design is better ? Who gets to pick the winning offer ?

I definitely agree that's a core question. I believe we are in an instance of public policies and proper evaluation of proposals.

IMHO, deciding if a design is better is not the hardest part, but getting the actual design implemented and not something else is complicated.

In France, there is an organization called ASN — Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, a strong independent (theorically) organization which is here to ensure nuclear matters are handled with almost absolute safety. As I see, France has been running nuclear more or less fine, of course, there were some hiccups (and there are still some, arguably, nowadays, it is complicated to attribute them to ASN, politics did not help a lot).

Regulation bodies seem to be working, so we are reducing this problem to protecting these regulation bodies and ensuring they are not broken, which is a hard problem, that, we share with many other issues we are tackling (e.g. competition).

Now, I see an even worse concern to "who gets to pick the winning offer ?" related to the previous question. Decision makers can have a bad habit to select solutions which are made by market leaders, e.g. tech guys buys some IBM because no one gets fired for buying some IBM.
Therefore, selecting winning offers has to be done with more than paperwork and financial health: orgs like ASN has to take an example, a demo reactor, check it, try it, verify it, etc, etc.

Though, I am deep in speculation at the moment, there will be many more specific challenges which I cannot know about.

> For exemple let's say Germany propose a safer design to a small country with the one time refuel feature, but Turkey propose another design and the buying country has better relationship with Turkey. What standing do you have to make them pick what you deem the better design ? The only recourse is to extend the legal framework and coercition power we use for arm sales. Same regarding nuclear material smuggling.

That's a correct concern, one which would exist, as per my unpopular opinion, no matter what, we give up on nuclear or not as an energy source.

> Except those framework work at the moment because, few country have any use for nuclear material and even fewer want to make a go at it. Once it becomes business as usual to trade nuclear material, it will simply exhaust the monitoring capacity of any international framework. ( At least that's my opinion )

I am not sure to what extent the dynamics of international framework can be scaled up, but that is also a right concern to have.

I would say that starting with very strict measures and trying to uphold them might be a start, the objective is to make it obvious that trading nuclear material must be done with the utmost care and no money can be saved up in that concern. It might help to keep the monitoring capacity to be enough.

In the case where we have no monitoring capacity left, I would argue this is the responsibility of everyone (read: citizens and politics) to reinforce these, as we are all gaining from that, otherwise, there is an unknown risk to run into unforeseen consequences.

Thankfully, this kind of responsibility is also here when elections can put dangerous people in office. :-)
We should be able to exercise it better and more, though, it is no silver bullet.

> The question is who the we is ? Energy plant maintenance is closer to server farm maintenance than software building. To twist your metaphor, if many countries were to handle the data infrastructure their economy depend on, they would collapse. That's the crux of the issue, and one of the subliminal teaching the public got from Fukushima. If Japan, the country of the famed six sigma, made a serie of decisions that led to an accident, chances are it's bound to happen to most other (developping ) countries, given long enough time. And I am intentionally not delving into the specifics of those decisions.

I would argue that the case of Fukushima is particularly special, so specifics would be needed, but I will try nevertheless without delving into it.

Nuclear plants require more than just maintenance, they also require dismantlement, construction, etc. The fact you require humans to perform these operations, collect samples, etc. is quite outdated, and we can build software and technology (read: use dumb robots that go through a plant and monitor some metrics, come back to a lab and upload their files).

What is annoying is that each step is hard and bothersome, so we try to extend the lifetime of our plants, making maintenance harder, etc.

Server farm maintenance is easier at some FANG companies (and more) because they can rely on technology / robotics to alleviate bothersome tasks. This can rely on stupid machines, but, sometimes, on some non-trivial software.

Therefore, I claim that server farm maintenance up to a scale require some software building.

Now, sure, countries do not have the ability to handle the data infrastructure of their economy. Nevertheless, this is a challenge that many countries (including France) will have to partially tackle, the reason for that being: data sovereignty, at least, for citizen data (health, etc.).
France already failed multiple times, is that reason to stop trying?

With this in mind, we can devise a strategy where we strengthen our technology infrastructure aiming for a sophistication level of FANG companies, with the funding of public bodies, while thinking about how to make safer, sounder nuclear plants and letting experts in international matters handle the negotiations with the neighbors.

Where we := society, precisely, everyone plays a part: (public|private) research, software companies, government, "interested" citizens (through Open Data for example).

> With these two sides of the issue in mind, it feels unreasonnable that so many commenters on the web at large are rooting for Germany to fail in the nuclear free direction.

Of course ; I believe this is true in general BTW: no one should wish for a country to fail because they made apparently "bad" decisions, truth is: things are always more complicated and harder.

Though, I can get the feeling of these commenters, looking at Europe energy landscape, reading reports from electricity public bodies, it is frustrating.

But I would rather use this energy (no pun intended) to see how we can move forward taking in account these decisions, rather than wasting time on wishing fellow humans to suffer from electricity issues.

> I just wanted to add that I commend you for that (blunt) sentence and it really should be part of the standard issues discussed when talking about nuclear.

:)