India and uranium

On September 5, India and Australia signed an agreement that barely made news anywhere in the world outside the two countries concerned. Australia is to allow the export of Australian uranium to India for the purposes of power generation. Australia sits on around one-third of the world’s uranium deposits and is keen to export as freely and widely as possible, and in an energy-hungry world there is always going to be a ready market. Currently, India generates most of its power by burning fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas. Expansion of its nuclear generation capacity is an obvious way forward — but there is a snag. India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and historically this has been a barrier to any deal such as the one recently signed that allows the import of uranium. Similarly, Australia is very careful about which countries it exports uranium to, and strict conditions are applied to any deal. The previous Australian government had agreed to civil nuclear energy cooperation with India, and both have been negotiating a nuclear safeguards agreement with strong verification protocols since 2012. Deal done, it is now full speed ahead.

In principle, there is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with the deal, but it does expose some of the hypocrisies that surround the trading of uranium. No cries of fear and outrage were to be heard from those countries keenest to police nuclear non-proliferation, no concerns expressed about the possibility of the Australian uranium being converted to weapons-grade material. The world at large seems relatively relaxed about India going shopping in the nuclear supermarket, and one wonders if it would be similarly relaxed if Pakistan did the same? One suspects not. Everything is negotiable. The Americans signed a deal with India in 2008 which allowed India to buy American nuclear fuel without scaling back its nuclear weapons programme. It is seeking a similar deal with Japan (which ironically is abandoning nuclear power in the wake of the Tsunami disaster in 2011) and nuclear non-proliferation is shown to be not a one-size-fits-all garment, ‘adjust to fit’ being the watchword.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 9^th, 2014.

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