Assessing Hedging Risks of Novel Reactor Designs

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Various countries around the world - including the UK - arecurrently planning on developing, employing, and exportingnew reactor designs within the next decade. Suchendeavours are founded on ambitions to combat climatechange. My PhD assesses whether these new reactordesigns - so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) - couldbe abused by states to advance ever closer to nuclearweapons acquisition. Whilst it is widely believed that SMRswill be safer and more secure, my research assesseswhether that automatically means that they are also lesssuitable for a state strategy that creeps closer to a nuclearweapon without an immediate desire to build one. Thisclandestine behaviour of "keeping nuclear options open" iscalled "nuclear hedging" and is currently assessed basedon a state's capability and intent to build a bomb. Myresearch proposes to change this assessment method byinstead evaluating which civilian nuclear reactors are mostprone to become part of such hedging strategies. Thereby, Ihope to contribute to the understanding of state behaviour,state decision-making and nuclear security. Based on theresults of this research, the nuclear industry may changetheir nuclear reactor designs to guard their reactors againsthedging, and policy makers would be made aware of anyinherent risks of hedging connected to specific reactordesigns, in particular regarding SMRs.