AUSTRALIA’S RULING Labor party voted yesterday to lift the long-standing ban on exporting uranium to India despite it retaining its strategic weapons arsenal and not being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Prime minister Julia Gillard’s proposal was passed 206-185 in favour of the motion to change Australia’s policy and clear the way for talks on a bilateral nuclear agreement.
Ms Gillard argued that it was neither rational nor intellectually defensible to sell uranium to China and not to India which is the world’s largest democracy and a nation of increasing global clout.
“Let’s just face facts here – our refusal to sell uranium to India is not going to cause India to decide that it will no longer have nuclear weapons,” Ms Gillard said. The move has been welcomed in India which faces an acute shortage of the metal crucial to its proliferating atomic industry.
India depends on uranium imports – shortages have caused civilian nuclear power plants to run far below capacity, supplying barely 3 per cent of the country’s growing power requirements.
Australia has almost 40 per cent of the world’s known reserves of uranium, which India needs to fuel about 30 nuclear plants it plans to construct over the next two decades. Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd cautioned that India needs to meet “onerous” conditions before trade could begin.
The move to export Australian uranium follows the landmark India-US civil nuclear pact of 2008 that permitted Delhi to conduct civil nuclear trade globally while allowing it to maintain its strategic weapons programme and not sign the NPT.
This agreement under which 14 of India’s 22 atomic reactors and nuclear facilities would be subject to international inspections was also ratified by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group of countries that control the supply of atomic material and technology worldwide.
Australia’s uranium industry had welcomed the policy shift which it said could lead to more Indian investment in Australian mining projects and vice-versa. But security analysts in Delhi said uranium sales could bring the two countries closer possibly as a future bulwark against Chinese military and economic capability and ambition in the region.