Australia – home to the world’s largest uranium reserves – should end a ban on exporting the reactor fuel to India, the Australian prime minister argued in an editorial Tuesday.
The country has long barred the sale of uranium to India because it refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “We will not sell India uranium for peaceful purposes – though Canada is preparing to – while policy allows us to export it to countries such as China, Japan and the United States. It is time for (the governing Labor party) to modernize our platform and enable us to strengthen our connection with dynamic, democratic India,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard wrote in The Age.
Should she persuade her government to allow the exports, Australia would join other countries that began allowing uranium sales to India following an agreement in 2005 granting the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its civilian nuclear facilities. The BBC quoted Australia’s resources minister as saying the ban was “a hangover from the 70s” and that the world has moved on. The U.S. reached an agreement allowing uranium exports to India in 2008.
As India plans to expand its power reactor fleet, it could be a boon to Australian miners. Their country is currently the third largest uranium exporter, according to the World Nuclear Association, although it’s home to 23 percent of the world’s uranium reserves. Despite its resources, Australia does not have any power reactors of its own. The government in 2007 began paving the way for nuclear plants as a way to reduce carbon emissions, but subsequent political leaders abandoned that effort.