There are advantages that CANDU had for Canada that aren’t as great for most other countries in the world. The main benefits are that you don’t need to enrich which is industrially demanding (enrichment requires you develop and maintain those capabilities or rely on another party that does) and that you can do online refueling. That was attractive for Canada because they had a relatively underdeveloped industry so doing all the heavy upfront costs of establishing it for enriching while not being able to make fuel for many plants was a tall and seriously expensive order while buying enriched fuel kind of puts you at the whim of someone else. Plus didn’t need to make a large pressure vessel which would have been difficult for Canada back then. And back in the day light water reactor capacity factors were hot garbage with outages all the time (and not quick outages either but long sustained ones) so refueling while still generating was awesome though eventually you do need a very extended retubing outage after a few decades. It also benefited Canada because Canada has both a massive amount of uranium ore and the largest water resources of any country. So they have ample inputs for the relatively simple processing of uranium into unenriched fuel and water to produce heavy water.
These are not as much the case for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia doesn’t really have a problem with being somewhat dependent on foreign suppliers and throwing around money (otherwise the deal wouldn’t be happening), they will apparently be testing over the next two years if they consider it a better deal to develop indigenous enrichment through this or not bother and just rely on the US doing it in their country. Generally though they are looking to spend money to carve out non-hydrocarbon areas of the economy to diversify out to so if they can do indigenous uranium mining and enrichment and sell that to others that would be considered a win. In any case, American companies will provide substantial assistance on setting this up since it’s not being developed independently. Light water capacity factors really tightened up and are now in like the 90%s rather than 60-70% so online refueling isn’t quite as attractive as it once was. And, unlike Canada, they don’t have tons of water resources and have to do a lot of expensive processing of seawater to even get water for drinking; you have to process an enormous quantity of water to get heavy water, particularly in the purity needed for reactor water grade.
Consider that even Canada is building a light water reactor rather than CANDU for the latest expansion at Darlington, a site which is otherwise all CANDU and had the latest actually built CANDU reactors in the country. Evidently they felt the economics worked out better that way or the people who have been doing CANDU for the longest would not be swapping horses like that.
There are advantages that CANDU had for Canada that aren’t as great for most other countries in the world. The main benefits are that you don’t need to enrich which is industrially demanding (enrichment requires you develop and maintain those capabilities or rely on another party that does) and that you can do online refueling. That was attractive for Canada because they had a relatively underdeveloped industry so doing all the heavy upfront costs of establishing it for enriching while not being able to make fuel for many plants was a tall and seriously expensive order while buying enriched fuel kind of puts you at the whim of someone else. Plus didn’t need to make a large pressure vessel which would have been difficult for Canada back then. And back in the day light water reactor capacity factors were hot garbage with outages all the time (and not quick outages either but long sustained ones) so refueling while still generating was awesome though eventually you do need a very extended retubing outage after a few decades. It also benefited Canada because Canada has both a massive amount of uranium ore and the largest water resources of any country. So they have ample inputs for the relatively simple processing of uranium into unenriched fuel and water to produce heavy water.
These are not as much the case for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia doesn’t really have a problem with being somewhat dependent on foreign suppliers and throwing around money (otherwise the deal wouldn’t be happening), they will apparently be testing over the next two years if they consider it a better deal to develop indigenous enrichment through this or not bother and just rely on the US doing it in their country. Generally though they are looking to spend money to carve out non-hydrocarbon areas of the economy to diversify out to so if they can do indigenous uranium mining and enrichment and sell that to others that would be considered a win. In any case, American companies will provide substantial assistance on setting this up since it’s not being developed independently. Light water capacity factors really tightened up and are now in like the 90%s rather than 60-70% so online refueling isn’t quite as attractive as it once was. And, unlike Canada, they don’t have tons of water resources and have to do a lot of expensive processing of seawater to even get water for drinking; you have to process an enormous quantity of water to get heavy water, particularly in the purity needed for reactor water grade.
Consider that even Canada is building a light water reactor rather than CANDU for the latest expansion at Darlington, a site which is otherwise all CANDU and had the latest actually built CANDU reactors in the country. Evidently they felt the economics worked out better that way or the people who have been doing CANDU for the longest would not be swapping horses like that.