Uranium May Be Exported to India from Australia

Ive wondered how long it would take for Australia to come to the international party and sell uranium to India. No reason why Australia should miss out on revenue when the rest of the world is doing it.

From The Age

Uranium exports to India on cards
DANIEL FLITTON
December 16, 2009

AUSTRALIA could drop its ban on uranium sales to India after an international expert panel called for a fresh approach to restricting the world's nuclear arsenal.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has launched the panel's final report in Tokyo as part of a renewed effort to bolster global nuclear controls amid fears over Iran's nuclear ambitions and atomic tests by North Korea.

The report calls for a dramatic cut in the world's nuclear arsenal - from the estimated 25,000 weapons now held by nine countries to a maximum of 2000 warheads by 2025.

But ''recognising the reality'' that India, Pakistan and Israel are unwilling to sign up to existing safeguards, the report says ''equivalent disciplines'' should be applied to help them meet disarmament obligations. These countries could then be given access to nuclear materials and technology for civilian purposes provided they show a strong commitment to disarmament and non-proliferation.

The findings from the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament leave Mr Rudd - who set up the commission with Japan - in an awkward position. Australia has refused to sell uranium to India because India sits outside the Non-proliferation Treaty, the main international pact to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.

''I think it's pretty self-evident that the ban on supplying uranium to India is a lost cause,'' commission co-chairman and former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans told The Age.

The Rudd Government angered officials in Delhi soon after coming to power in 2007 when it abandoned a Howard-era deal to supply yellowcake to India.

But it subsequently blessed a deal between India and the United States on the transfer of civilian nuclear technology, paving the way for other countries such as Canada to sell uranium to India.

''It's self-evidently rather quixotic for Australia to be maintaining a ban on the sale of uranium until India joins the NPT when manifestly it is not going to join the NPT and manifestly this is not going to stop it acquiring uranium from other sources,'' Mr Evans said.

He said he hoped the commission's report would challenge the reflex to become ''consumed by NPT theology'' and that nations would instead work through the difficult issues raised by the place of nuclear technology in the modern world.

''None of it is easy - getting moving on the multilateral stuff, getting any kind of movement out of the Chinese, Pakistanis and Indians, when they are in the process of actually increasing their arsenals … over and over again, when you explore the detail, you run into these kind of real-world problems.''

Anti-nuclear activists said the report set too slow a timetable for eliminating weapons. ''In the absence of a clear road map to zero, there are dangers associated with a still cataclysmic destructive capacity being perceived as in any way acceptable, safe or stable,'' the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said.

Mr Evans said he felt the atmosphere for tightening controls was now more constructive than at any time in the past decade. ''I think the public mood is in the process of being re-awakened after a decade-long sleepwalk. Not only did nothing very much happen positively, we went backwards,'' he said, citing nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, a stalemate in international talks on disarmament, intelligence failures and the problems of Iran and North Korea.