Uranium sales to India are vital to reducing the world’s carbon footprint, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill said this week in the Australian newspaper. “Along with China, India is engaged in the most spectacular advance of the great mass of its people out of poverty that the world has ever seen. And India needs access to nuclear power to limit the carbon impact of that expansion.”
Weatherill will embark on a trade mission to India in November.
Mr Weatherill joined forces with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (see our blog post) last December to overturn a longstanding Labor ban on uranium sales to India. “I did so partly because of the importance to South Australia’s mining future of being able to realise the uranium assets we have. “It is a matter of some significance in the proposed expansion of the Olympic Dam mine. ut I also supported it for two other reasons more closely related to the situation of India. “My view was, and is, that we should join others in the world in respecting India’s reasons for not signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and in respecting India as an international citizen. We have a solid basis for a relationship of trust, and we ought to honour that.”
In the 12 months to April this year, the value of South Australian exports of goods to India increased by 6 per cent to $751 million. Last financial year the state imported goods to the value of $133 million.
