By DPA
Sydney : Australia will sell uranium to India to fuel the nuclear reactors that help the South Asian giant keep pace with soaring electricity demand, news reports said Wednesday.
The government of Prime Minister John Howard decided it didn’t make sense to ban uranium exports to India when Australia had recently agreed to sell uranium to China, The Australian newspaper reported.
The sticking point with India has been its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But Canberra has decided to follow the lead of the US and skirt the NPT requirement by striking a bilateral safeguards agreement.
Howard had flagged a softening in a policy requiring importing countries be NPT signatories.
“Certainly our policy to date has been to prohibit sales to countries which are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,” Howard said earlier this year. “But as time goes by, if India were to meet safeguard obligations, some Australians would see it as anomalous that we would sell uranium to China but not India.”
Australia has 40 percent of the world’s known uranium reserves and is the top exporter.
The issue is divisive in Australia because the opposition Labor Party argues that selling uranium to India would undermine the NPT. Labor is well ahead in opinion polls and is seen as the likely victor in a general election that is expected in November.
Rob McLelland, Labor’s foreign affairs spokesperson, said that shipping uranium to India would undermine the NPT.
“The bottom line is that the Howard government is worse than ambivalent when it comes to nuclear proliferation – it is positively obstructive,” he said.
India, though not an NPT signatory, has a good record for not passing on nuclear technology. India refuses to sign the NPT because of concerns that it restricts nuclear weapons to those countries already in possession of such devices when the pact was drawn up in 1970.
China, which is an NPT signatory, is suspected by some of passing on nuclear secrets.
In April 2006, China signed a contract to import uranium from Australia.
Howard visited India in March 2006 and was pressed by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to allow sales of uranium. He agreed to send a delegation to India and the United States to study the agreement between Washington and New Delhi to share nuclear-power technology.
Australia will negotiate a nuclear-safeguards agreement with India over permissible uses for Australian uranium. India will be required to separate its civilian nuclear energy programme from its military nuclear weapons programme, and Australian uranium will be allowed to go only to its peaceful nuclear power plants.