With India making an entry into the global nuclear technology market on the back of the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement, the Australian government may now look at modifying its domestic rules to enable uranium export to India.
This comes subsequent to Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a 46-member organisation of which Australia is a part, granting a waiver to India in September 2008 thereby, allowing access to civilian nuclear technology and fuel from other nations. Effectively, this waiver has made India the only country with nuclear weapons to partake in nuclear commerce without being a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). However, exports from Australia are outside the purview of this.
With 40 per cent of the world’s proven uranium reserves, the state of South Australia (SA) was keen on exploring opportunities to commercially exploit the resources, South Australia’s Department of trade & economic development director (investments), Damian Papps said here today.
To that end, the government was considering amending the current regulations enabling uranium to be exporting to India.
This is because even if domestic firms invest in uranium exploration and mining there, they cannot bring this back to India as per existing rules. Papps explained that Australia was attempting to partner with firms from country’s such as the United States, China, Canada, Germany as well as India to share the cost of infrastructure projects required to support mining augmentation in the country.
At present, India’s Reliance Industries has a presence in Australia's uranium mining sector through Uranium Exploration Australia (UXA) with which it inked an agreement in 2007 for exploration across eight tenements, including four near the Olympic Dam mine in northern SA.