Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) Approves US-India Nuclear Agreement - Let the Marketing Begin
India, long isolated from the world’s nuclear power industry, got one more important nod on Saturday September 6, 2008 in its quest to become a more respected member of the nuclear club. The Nuclear Suppliers Group, after three intense days of deliberation, approved a waiver to its normal rules to allow sales of nuclear goods and services to India without requiring the country to formally join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
If you are deeply interested in the issue, you might want to visit the play-by-play posts of the three day long deliberative meeting provided on Idaho Samizdat. The concluding post was titled Nuclear Suppliers Group approves India deal: A breakthrough comes in Vienna after three days of tough negotiations.
Now there is just one more step required to allow US companies to engage in selling nuclear fuel, nuclear plants and components, and nuclear services to one of the world’s largest and fastest growing electrical power markets. The US Congress has to formally approve the deal. The Congress approved the deal negotiated between India and the US once already. (The text of the complete act - Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 is readily available.) That approval was subject to a caveat - the deal had go before the NSG, obtain approval and come back to Congress for one more review.
The success of that final review is not certain - the US Congress intends only a very brief session before adjourning in preparation for the scheduled elections in November, and there is very little likelihood of a “lame duck” session after the elections before the presidential inauguration in January. If Congress waits until the next President is seated, other pressing business may delay the approval by several more months or it might push it off the table altogether.
That delay would hurt US workers and US companies, but it would probably not stop India from gaining new partners in the international market. Several of the competitors to US companies have indicated that the NSG rules waiver is all the permission that they need in order to enter into what might be a $100 - 200 billion dollar market over the next 10-15 years.
Why is the deal even necessary? Isn’t India a reliable trading partner already?
In 1974, India conducted a nuclear explosive test that has since gained the nickname “Smiling Budda”. Though the device tested was approximately equivalent to the peaceful nuclear explosives produced by the US under the Plowshares Program, the test sent shock waves through the international community.
Ever since that test, India has been on its own with regard to its nuclear power technology and construction programs. That 34-year isolation has produced some very interesting designs and has resulted in India being a world leader in certain types of reactor designs, but it has also restricted the growth of India’s nuclear power contribution to electrical power production.
India is a proud nation that never really accepted the inherent two-tiered system designed into the NPT that allowed nations that had built and tested nuclear explosives before a certain date to keep and even expand their arsenals while forever preventing other nations, no matter how stable or advanced, from doing exactly the same thing.
The main obstacle that has limited India’s ability to build and reliably operate nuclear power plants has been the fact that the country is not well endowed with uranium, though it has one of the world’s largest proven thorium resource. Unfortunately, despite all of the excitement about thorium as a reactor fuel source, it is much more useful for a country that has had access to a lot of uranium during a first generation of nuclear plants.
With sufficient uranium from abroad and increased cooperation and supplies of other useful components, India’s nuclear power industry is poised for rapid growth.
That should be cause for great celebration among those people who worry that the country’s rapidly growing coal consumption - see the graph at the beginning of the article - is causing a worsening contribution to the global problem of problem emissions like mercury, fly ash, Sulfur Dioxide, Nitrogen Oxides and Carbon Dioxide.
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[...] India and China have made some significant investments in renewable energy - setting up large scale solar and wind energy projects - but still lack a comprehensive nationwide plan to achieve emission reduction or renewable energy goals. It’s not that these Asian giants lack resources to formulate and implement a policy of freezing and steadily reducing their carbon emissions. Both are a manufacturing hubs of a significant shre of world’s solar panels and wind turbines, China has the world’s largest foreign currency reserves and India is seeing the dawn of nuclear powered energy production. [...]