Australia paving way for uranium sales to United Arab Emirates

Mar 9, 2011, 9:01 GMT

Sydney - Australia plans to start talks on a bilateral nuclear safeguards agreement with the United Arab Emirates in anticipation that uranium sales would follow, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday.

'We believe that the fundamentals for such an agreement to occur are now in place,' Rudd told the Australian news agency AAP from Abu Dhabi.

The United Arab Emirates is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, meaning there would be none of the difficulties in forging an export agreement that there have been with India, which is not a signatory.

The Emirates aims to have nuclear power stations up and running by 2017.

Opposition Liberal Party foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop welcomed the announcement but said the government was showing 'hypocrisy' in refusing to sell uranium to India.

'This announcement will be taken in India as a further snub,' Bishop said.

She argued that the government, which has no objections to selling uranium to China, is being hypocritical by supporting technology transfers but at the same time banning the export of the feedstock for the nuclear power stations that India wants to build.

The Liberals argued that nuclear power is green energy and Australia ought to be supporting India's efforts to reduce its emissions.

Australia has 40 per cent of the world's easily recoverable reserves of uranium but has denied sales to India despite voting with other members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to end a 36-year embargo on nuclear trade with New Delhi.

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