Australia agreed to supply uranium to India, ending a stalemate in talks since 2014 following New Delhi’s refusal to sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed an administrative deal on Thursday, facilitating an agreement on exports of the nuclear material, they said in a joint announcement in Melbourne.
The ‘administrative arrangement’ will enable long-term Australian uranium exports to India for peaceful purposes and under IAEA safeguards.
Australia also reiterated its backing for India’s membership in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group.
Canberra has the world’s largest known resources of the radioactive metal used in nuclear power plants, and in nuclear weapons. Australia has no nuclear power or weapons, and hence all of the metal is exported.
India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which recognizes only the US, China, Britain, France, and Russia as nuclear weapons powers. Australia has signed the pact and refuses to sell uranium to non-signatories.
New Delhi calls the treaty discriminatory, as it recognizes only states that tested nuclear devices before January 1967 as legitimate nuclear weapon states. India first tested a nuclear weapon in 1974, making it the first nation apart from the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to conduct a confirmed nuclear test.
The country was hit with international technology sanctions and uranium trade bans after it conducted nuclear tests again in 1998.
In 2008, the Nuclear Suppliers Group of countries, which includes the US, granted a waiver allowing India to buy uranium from its members, opening up New Delhi’s path to pursue bilateral pacts to get the material. It inked such a deal with Canada in March.
Australia had opposed selling uranium to India until it signs the Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it eased that stance in 2014, when Canberra agreed to allow exports subject to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards and “separation of the Indian civilian and military nuclear programs.”
The administrative agreement signed on Thursday is seen as removing the obstacles to starting uranium supplies, helping India achieve its clean energy goals.
New Delhi seeks to generate 100 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2047 – enough to power nearly 60 million homes a year in a country with a population of 1.4 billion.
Though the South Asian nation has doubled its installed nuclear power capacity in the last decade, nuclear still accounts for a mere 3% of its power generation.
Modi, who is on a three-day trip to Australia, also launched a dedicated critical minerals corridor.
The countries pledged greater defense and security cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, “reflecting a step change in the depth and ambition” of the bilateral ties, apart from the Australia-India Partnership on Cyber, Critical Technologies and Supply Chains (AI-PACTS).