It seems that we are going another round of the “sell uranium to India” discussion, with “Uranium Breath” Martin Ferguson pushing for the policy to currently prohibits sales to India to be changed. You can take your pick of op-eds criticizing the idea.
The stated reason why Australia doesn’t currently sell uranium to India is that it hasn’t signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which virtually every state has signed up to except India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea (who withdrew in 2003, though that withdrawal is not accepted by much of the international community). Under the terms of the treaty, only the USA, the Soviet Union (now Russia), the UK, France, and China are allowed to have nuclear arsenals, though they are supposed to work towards disarmament. Other countries are not permitted to develop nuclear weapons. Were India to sign, they would be obligated to dismantle their nuclear arsenal.
As such, the chances of India signing the NNPT as it currently stands are minimal – and, frankly, not without some justification. But the alternative – modifying the NNPT to allow India to join without giving up its arsenal – is also a non-starter. So Australia has taken the principled position, thus far, and refused to sell uranium to India. Pat ourselves on the back. We stood up for nuclear non-proliferation.
Except, when it actually mattered, we took an entirely different view.
The Nuclear Suppliers Group is an intergovernmental grouping of the major supplier nations of “licit” nuclear material. As part of a deal between the United States and India to allow the sale of American civil nuclear materials there, a waiver from the NSG was required. If Australia had seriously wanted to restrict the supply of uranium to India, it could have opposed the waiver at the NSG. In 2008, the waiver was approved by consensus. Russia now sells uranium to India, and Canada is preparing to do so.
Uranium is a fungible commodity. Australian, Canadian, Khazakh, Russian, or Upper Voltan, it all burns the same. Whether Australian uranium specifically ends up in Indian reactors makes little difference. We had the chance to restrict the supply of uranium to India in 2008, and we folded.
As such, any debate about changing Australia’s own policy on uranium sales to India is almost exclusively about politics – the politics of the Australia-India relationship, and the politics of uranium mining in Australia. Its substantive effect on the industry, here and in India, will be negligible.
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is a joke, it ought to be ditched and replaced with something more moral. It’s bizarre – the winners of WW2 are allowed to have nuclear weapons, no one else is.
France and the UK ought to renounce the use of nuclear weapons immediately, the rest to work towards disarmament as an actual goal.
As for U sales to India, I can’t see an actual real non-proliferation reason (which is surely the reason that counts?) to block it.
Wilful, it comes down to whether you see not selling uranium to India, on the basis of them not being an NNPT member, supports the goal of non-proliferation (assuming that non-proliferation is an unequivocal good that must be prioritized over everything else).
In essence, if you let India fully in to the nuclear club, what happens when, say, Brazil, or Indonesia, or Pakistan, wants in?
Clearly, non-proliferation for India hasn’t worked for the past three decades. Why are we pretending it has? The NNPT is a worthless bit of paper. “We” haven’t “let India in” to the “club”, they’ve gone and built their own damned club of one. With effectively no consequences or so it seems. If brazil goes and does it, I’m sure the world would be terribly disappointed, but nothing would happen.
how can it happen, what moral right does the US or any of the other “club” members have to say that nuclear weapons are good enough for them, but not good enough for the emerging powers.
I do think that non-proliferation is an unequivocal good, but not quite as unequivocal as disarmament.
The NNPT is a joke.
Australia should have our own Nuclear weapons. We are a small population with a huge geographic area to defend. We need to make it as costly as possible for anyone wanting to take a swing at us.
Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of nuclear Power. We should have a minesite to disposal complete chain of production including power generation and reprocessing and enrichment. We should also use leverage off this to bcome a world leader in Nuclear Science with our major universities being linked into the programs. We should be able to become a destination of choice for applied and theoretical scientists by building the world’s biggest collider without having to go into three different countries.
This would be a much better spending of Government money than the NBN. Private sector can do the NBN thing, easily. It can’t do the Nuclear industry thing so easily.
Y’know razor, it’s OK to have a good idea and say “we can afford it” without mentioning the NBN. Not saying it’s your reflexive idiocy, but it is the reflexive idiocy of many right at the moment.
Oh, Robert, Upper Voltan – does that refer to the head and torso of the Mayan god, or to a country that hasn’t existed for more than 25 years?
@5 – two birds with one stone.
Wilful said:
Given that the opposition went within a handful of votes and a couple of indies of getting the chance to hand back about $27million per day for the next 10 years to Australia’s on-shore miners (nearly three NBNs over that time), I don’t regard anything the opposition says on “waste” as worthy of being taken seriously.
People should be reminded at every opportunity that the Opposition/Murdochracy campaign deprived Australia’s government of $60bn dollars between now and 2020 and that even this cost was only 2/3 of the cost Australia would have suffered if the Opposition had won. This is the real cost of Abbott.
Returning to the subject at hand though …
I don’t see how you can sell uranium to India (or to anyone supply to India) outside the NNPT and not call for the NNPT to be scrapped. If the treaty is no good, then let it be abandoned. If it is adequate, then respect it.
Given that India, which has about 12% of the world’s Thorium Oxide, could easily run a domestic nuclear program with that, you do wonder why they’d be interested in buying uranium at all, except for the weapons capability. Thorium wouldn’t be all that useful for that of course.
Two points Fran.
The original proposal of the RSPT was not and never has been law, it has only ever been a policy proposal and therefore to say that any money is being “handed back” is laughably over eging the pudding. Using the term “handing back” also indicates a mind set. Profits aren’t owned by the Government – just taken by them.
Secondly, if Thorium is so good then why the firetruck isn’t it being exploited?
Given that India, which has about 12% of the world’s Thorium Oxide, could easily run a domestic nuclear program with that, you do wonder why they’d be interested in buying uranium at all, except for the weapons capability. Thorium wouldn’t be all that useful for that of course.
Maybe because all of their current nuclear power stations are CANDU design, fed by Uranium?
AIUI, one could, with minor modifications, convert them to running on U233 from thorium. Of course, they aren’t short of fissile material that they could use already. Then again there are other sources of uranium they could use — seawater harvesting for example.
There’s always the option of complying with NNPT of course.
Razor said:
It was more than a proposal. Right up until he was sacked, Rudd wasn’t backing off. Had he not been challenged, it’s likely he’d have won and the RSPT would have passed with Greens support in the Senate.
Mineral resources aren’t owned by the mining companies. Mineral resources are non-renewable parts of the the country’s capital and are extracted by the mining companies to make a profit which ought to be largely retained by the country, less a suitable fee for the risk and cost involved.
One’s perspective on this is typically determined by whether one sides with the interests of working people or capitalists.
Mining companies pay for the right to mine resources. The RSPT both in original and current form are a dogs breakfast thatmakes the GST exemptions look truely a model of effecient design.
Razor, none of this is really germane to the point at issue here.
Sorry
She started it.
Just another attempt by the US to reduce international law and agreement to:
“whatever we say .. today”.
Iran, no nukes, NPT signer – BAD. Indian, lots of nukes, non NPT signer GOOD (cause it might be against China).
A sort of “two legs bad …” thing.
And from our own Dept of Total hypocrisy and Lying Your Teeth Off: Australia (“all the way with LBJ”) supports it totally.
Just as we have supported every US ‘initiative’ since WW2 (including the one I love: supporting Pol Pot, good on you Gareth).
Same old, same old.
Just as an aside, yet another from the sceptics Dept of Total Hypocrisy and Lying Your Teeth Off:
“As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail”.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27501.htm
Australia should have our own Nuclear weapons
Great idea, not. If you have nukes, you become a target for other countries that have nukes – like, let me see, oh yes, China – who will consider using theirs on you before you can use yours on them.
@18 – you credit the PRC with a current level of moral restraint that is not supported by any evidence.
What evidence would you accept as adequate to demonstrate moral restraint?
Razor, it is a matter of rational self interest, not morality, both ours and theirs.
One might add that the claim that Saddam possessed nukes didn’t actually protect Iraq from attack.
It doesn’t matter that nobody with a scrap of sense (or even those whose claim to sense was in serious dispute) believed Saddam had deployable nukes or other WMD at the time. A clear precedent has been established. Having nukes is a pretext and predisposing factor for pre-emptive military action.
The North Korean comparison, though amusing, is unhelpful because North Korea is on China’s border, and China wouldn’t be the least bit amused if the DPRK were attacked — and China not only has the military firepower to hurt an aggressor, but the economic firepower to do so as well. None of the candidates for an attack on the DPRK want that kind of pain. Moreover, the potential for collateral damage would be huge.
Not so Australia. A not-quite-right-with-itself regime could bomb/nuke this place and believe there would be almost no blowback — pun intended. Australia could not realistically threaten to nuke anyone else without persuading the Australian population to expect very serious blowback at best. Nobody in the region is going to interpret a declaration by Australia of its willingness to build and deploy nuclear weapons as anything but a declaration that the kangaroos have finally made it into the top paddock. Luckily for us, the voting population, as manipulable as they are, would treat harshly anyone suggesting we ought to go down this road.
No one seriously claimed that Saddam possessed nukes.
All that was claimed, cynically and falsely and with malice aforethought, was that Saddam was actively engaged in building a nuke.
Blair and Bush lied about this and lied deliberately. Those who tried to correct their misrepresentations were punished and persecuted.
True enough Katz, but those cynical, false, malicious and self-serving policy pranksters encouraged the public to think so.
So I would argue that if Bush, Blair and Howard really believed that Saddam had nukes, they would not have invaded Iraq.
A mini-doomsday machine is a guarantee against invasion.
A mini-doomsday machine
oxymoron anyone?
I find myself agreeing with Fran about the strategic uselessness of nuclear weapons for Australia. Australia’s long held policy of discouraging nuclear weapons proliferation is in the national interest.
The injection of nuclear weapons into the India-Pakistan relationship has been the most dangerous development in our corner of the world. Military conflict continues and there exist influential factions in both polities who would contemplate first use in a range of possible circumstances. The potential gains for Australia arising from a South African style nuclear disarmament in south Asia outweigh any cash gains from sale of fissionable material for the Indian civil program. The alleged gains in terms of increasing Australian engagement with India are illusory and depend on current political arrangements in India continuing for ever. Australian agreement to sell fissionable materials to India risks being seen to take sides in internal Indian politics and in the Indian Pakistani conflict. Both sets of relationships are highly volatile.
Moreover, Australia has other customers for the stuff. Not selling to India doesn’t mean loss of profits.
Especially given the claim that uranium is fungible. Although we are closer to India than some other suppliers.
I too agree that Razor’s idea is ridiculous. Australia could never build or run a nuclear weapons program big enough to deter the Chinese, and if Razor’s morbid fantasies about their lack of morality are true, they’re hardly going to care if we nuke a few of their cities before they wipe us out and get to take our resources for free.
Not that Razor’s fantasies are true.
What would happen if we invested in a nuclear weapons program is that it would start a regional arms race, in which all the smaller nations would divert money from much needed civilian infrastructure to their weapons programs (conventional or nuclear), increasing regional instability.
East and South East Asia have been very peaceful and growing very nicely over the last 30 years, despite the presence of multiple potential conflict triggers, many of them very serious, and we’ve even been able to avoid much tension over the growth of a new regional superpower, and the demotion of the region’s economic power. Why would anyone be so stupid as to disturb this nice equilibrium over something as strategically useless as nuclear weapons?
Of course if you’re in either the weapons business, or in any business (including politics) that does well out of uncertainty, then Australia getting a nuke sounds like a rollicking good idea.
If the USA and Canada sell uranium to India under an NNPT waiver and the NNPT survives, then Australia should also sell uranium to India. NNPT is to prevent the spread of weapons. India already has weapons – so the NNPT has no practical application in their case.
Disarmament is a separate issue. India needs to disarm whether or not we sell them uranium. As does everybody else.
India is no greater threat to the world than the US or Russia or China. (Those three however pose a greater threat than the UK or France.)
The issue of whether a country is serious when it makes an international commitment is an important one. Australia could ignore the NNPT and export uranium to India, but that would be that if we make a commitment under any other international regime, such as the UNFCCC, why should others take our commitment seriously? And if Australia’s commitments can’t be taken seriously, why should anyone take China’s commitments – such as their pledge to reduce the emissions intensity of their economy by 40 percent by 2020 – seriously?
Peter, who in the world thinks we take the UNCRSR seriously?
The world is not going hold its breath on China’s adherence to UN Conventions on the basis of what we do about them.
Hey guess what everyone, India is one of the few countries actually doing research into http://www.physorg.com/news205141972.html>thorium reactors.
Thorium isn’t as cheap and easy to use in a nuclear reactor as uranium is, from what I understand, which is why it isn’t being used – that and thorium reactors haven’t been fully commercialised yet.
So yes, thorium has advantages over uranium but I believe it does come at some cost.
And given the nuclear industry has spent the last three decades or so going pretty much nowhere in most of the western world, with few incentives towards R&D, it isn’t a surprise that thorium reactor development has languished.
Footnote: I’ve become a reluctant supporter of nuclear power in the past few years as part of a solution to global warming which also includes renewable energy.
Proliferation remains my big concern so I would like to see more research done into thorium reactors.
Ah cripes borked that link.