Thanks for the answer ! I'll continue the debate because I think it's worth exploring.
The problem is effectively nuclear proliferation. And in my opinion the two links you provided are embryos of solution.
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 ?
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.
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 )
As for the second part of the argument:
>> Consider this bad metaphor: as we are writing more and more software, some of them are increasingly critical to users, therefore, we invest in different levels of guaranteeing software is working as intended (e.g. formal methods, etc.).
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.
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.
Edit:
>> Unpopular opinion: I do not think it is possible to get rid of the inherent risk of nuclear proliferation, even without building nuclear reactors in non-wealthy countries.
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.