What a load of hypocritical hogswallop. India has already had nuclear weapons for many years and despite being continuously involved in border disputes, it has not caused any problems. The authors condescending attitude towards the Indians is quite frankly appalling.

India has a huge population that is it working hard on raising out of poverty and with this comes a growing demand for electricity. What would the author have these people do, burn more coal? Or perhaps continue to live without the comforts that the author enjoys? (and please do a tiny little bit of research into the scale of the problem before you mention renewable and understand how many dams that would mean).

Grumbler's right on the money!
Demonstrably dumb Dave doesn't have a clue.
Of all the countries we need to assist with some uranium sales, it is India, which is one of a few nations heavily investing in the thorium alternative.
And that still needs some uranium oxide or plutonium to kick start it, Genius!
And if Dave would stop reading last centuries history, he would know that there's no weapons spin off in thorium. None!
A new type of thorium reactor, may even be able to produce the isotope, 233.
Which will then endlessly sustain the reaction; meaning, no oxides then needed.
But even where they are, the waste product is reduced by as much as 90%, with the remaining waste being far less toxic, with a massively reduced half life.
And fluoride thorium salt, may be the answer the solar thermal industry needs, to turn solar thermal into a fair dinkum 24/7 peak demand option.
Dave, suggest engaging brain before putting mouth into gear?
And just try to ignore the burning smell emanating from previously unused cerebral circuits.
Novel new daily use, will alleviate that problem? Hopefully? Occasionally?
It's not nuclear for power for peace, that's threatening the world pal, rather carbon!
Would you rather we sell even more coal to a billion plus Indian, Genius?
You'll have a nice day now, y'hear.
Rhrosty.

For some time I have had the honour of working alongside young and patriotic Indians who are determined to lift their fellow citizens out of poverty. It is an enormous task - one third of the world's desperately poor live within the boundaries of this nation. Yet they are determined to achieve it and I believe they will.

In the next few years they aim to end the pollution of the Holy Ganga River, provide electricity and clean water to every village, upgrade the transport system, promote economic growth to the point where every young person can look forward to employment - and that is before we even look at the acute social problems of violence against women and minorities.

And it will be done despite the objections of comfortable, middle-class radicals like Mr Sweeney who think these massive tasks can be achieved without the need for a nuclear industry. Mr Sweeney would no doubt like to put solar panels on the roofs of all Indian homes. Trouble is, Mr Sweeney, a lot of Indian homes don't have roofs that you would recognise.

India is looking at renewable power now and in the future, but it cannot possibly supply the energy needed to give 1.2 billion people an adequate standard of living in even the medium term, and we do not intend to wait for ever.

You know nothing about India, Mr Sweeney. Your remarks are insulting to this country and I treat them with the contempt they deserve.

‘morning Dave,

Don’t you think it’s time to drag yourself screaming into at least the 1990’s?

The anti-nuclear activism is so out of date. There are already close to a 1,000 nuclear reactors in operation and more being built. You don’t want coal, oil, gas or other forms of fossil fuels. You don’t want nuclear powered generation, so what energy alternative do you have to offer for the maintenance of developed nations and for opportunities for the desperately poor nations to improve the lot of their populations?

India has already taken a stand on de-carbonization, it has said sod off. They have banned Greenpeace activists who have injected the 93% funding that has been generated overseas and like Japan, Germany, Canada, Russia, China, Norway, Bangladesh, Australia, NZ and United Arab Emirates. They will not be attending the next UNFCCC gabfest to try to breath life into the Kyoto cadaver which passed away quietly in December 2012.

Of the 144 parties to Kyoto, only 11 have signed up.

Get over it, GAGW is a dead parrot, the world is getting on with economic growth driven by burning anything they can.

"There are none so blind as those who WILL not see".
When the inevitable accidents and spills happen where will all these champions of Nuke be? No doubt pointing the finger everywhere but at themselves.
Nukes are DIRTY, in mining, transport, use and disposal, and they are dirty for millennia after, but the champs blithely assume that all those problems won't cause any harm at all.
Then there's the political stability on the sub-continent, shaky at the best of times, who can predict where THAT will go?
The so-called "cheap" power is a chimera too, it's only cheap if you don't take into account infrastructure costs, government subsidies and all the associated costs of transport and disposal, include them and nuclear is far and away the costliest and most threatening possible source of power, hands down.
Contrary to the opinions above, India is an almost perfect situation for renewables, and setting up local sources is far more efficient and reliable than a reactor and all the transmission facilities required.

Dave Sweeney

You must be feeling good and Green.

But India has alternative Uranium suppliers - Kazakhstan, Russia and France - which means your whole article misses the point.

Check this August 2014 article:

"In quantitative terms, in the last four years, India received a total of 2,215 tonnes of uranium from Kazakhstan and Russia, including a shipment of 118 tonnes from Russia this fiscal. Till March 2011, the country had received 868 tonnes of uranium from France, Russia and Kazakhstan, comprising 300 tonnes of natural uranium concentrate from Areva, 58 tonnes as enriched uranium dioxide pellets from Areva, 210 tonnes as natural uranium oxide pellets from Russia’s TVEL and 300 tonnes as natural uranium from Kazatomprom."

http://indianexpress.com/article/business/business-others/as-thermal-sets-idle-kazakh-russian-uranium-imports-perk-up-nuke-power/#sthash.z6Pkr89I.dpuf

'morning G'day Bruce,

Who are you quoting when you say "There are none so blind as those who WILL not see".?

Blind to what? What will we not see? Who precisely are those to whom you refer? Please don't respond with " all those who disagree" with you. That would be too obvious.

India is currently considered a friendly country to Australia. We feel safe.

Situations in the world can change DRAMATICALLY however.

The fact is that India is still quite a barbaric nation in many, many ways, despite it's gains and advances. It's a very cruel nation, with lots of horrid, inhumane internal practices.

India is not, and will never be, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty nor any similar future treaty. It goes against India's culture and principles, and the people on this forum simply don't comprehend that. It will use it's nuclear arsenal eventually to subjugate Pakistan, and any other country that interferes with India's will.

Let's keep our uranium out of India. Let's not be part of India's future power surge.

Sweeney's special pleading for uranium-phobia is ludicrous. You need steel to make nuclear weapons too, does that mean we shouldn't sell iron ore to India either? It's the same logic!

AdrianD

Much of what you say is true. But it is especiously hard to generalise about India's people - a highly diverse nation of 1.2 Billion.

Mark Duffett

Iron may be a constituent of nuclear weapons but its the explosives that distinguish nuclear weapons from the merely conventional. Those nuclear explosives include Uranium + its derivatives (Plutonium + Tritium for extra bang).

On India's latest nasty nuke see my blog at http://gentleseas.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/why-would-india-want-to-develop-10000_26.html

Pete

If people like Dave Sweeney are so concerned about possible destructive technology then they must lobby to stop funding Universities because that's where much of this is created at taxpayers expense.

For the rotating medico:
There Are None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See:
• According to the ‘Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings’ this proverb has been traced back to 1546 (John Heywood), and resembles the Biblical verse Jeremiah 5:21 (‘Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not’). In 1738 it was used by Jonathan Swift in his ‘Polite Conversation’ and is first attested in the United States in the 1713 ‘Works of Thomas Chalkley’. The full saying is: ‘There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know’.
"Those" refers to all those who, knowing full well the dangers associated with nukes, blithely assume that all will be well, eternally. Bad things just won't happen.

"Those"
G'day bruce,
We could use that term to describe the Lefties who believe they'll be spared when the crap hits the fan blades.
Nukes are are both a blessing & a curse. Depends which side you're on. I'd think by now there's enough proof that small power plants are reasonably safe whereas large ones are uncontrollable.
In sensible hands they could be quite safe but get the experts in & you're asking for trouble.
Same goes for everything really.

Dearest G'dayBruce

On this, this Saturday night, as I prepare to meat ram my babe (a fully grown female) I am distracted by your most puzzling post.

What in Allah's green Earth are U babbling about?

Fair go mate. Nil coitus desperandum.

As the pork sword thrusteth into fluid fields I shalt be thinking of you.

Butt severly puzzling.

Peter Peck-her.

I stand by my position that Sweeney's career-long conflation of weapons with electricity production is a ludicrous red herring. If a nation truly wants nuclear weapons, trying to restrict external supply of uranium isn't going to stop them. The stuff can be extracted from seawater if need be, and still only be a tiny fraction of the weapon development and production cost. Export restrictions have done nothing for non-proliferation; their only effect has been to make coal look more reliable and attractive for power generation. That's the true disaster, and Sweeney bears significant responsibility for it.

"There are none so blind as those who WILL not see".

A very appropiate phrase. If only people would actually look at the facts & actual risks (not the codswallop spruiked by the "useful idiots" like Caldicott) and compare all the different power generation alternatives, they would actually see!

Dave Sweeny is another anti nuclear luddite but some of what his has written is absolutely true.

Australia should not sell uranium to India because their "assurances" are not worth a cracker. India gained it's nuclear technology from Western nations (notably Canada) after giving the same 'assurances" that it would not use the technology to build a bomb. Trust is an ephemeral thing. Once one side has violated a trust the other can hardly trust them again. This prompted Indian's blood enemies the Pakistanis to do the same thing, and now we have an "Islamic" bomb in a dysfunctional society full of violent religious nutters. Thank you India. Fark you very much.

Second, the Indian nuclear industry is shrouded in total official secrecy for good reason. It is so unsafe that it barely comprehensible. One four corners expose' (Yeah, I know it was the ABC and it can't be trusted either) showed villagers bathing and cleaning their teeth in a radioactive settling pond next to a reactor. Another segment claimed that the Indians used human beings instead of robots to clean reactors because people are cheap but robots expensive. You read me right, human beings. They give a queue of miserably poor schmucks a mop and a bucket and a guy stands next to a entry portal to the reactor vessel with a stopwatch. Each man in the qqueue get 90 seconds inside the reactor to clean it. It's a once in a lifetime job. But some schmucks are so poor that they go around for seconds and maybe even thirds.

Finally, there is the little matter of India and Pakistan nearly pushing their buttons when a large meteorite fell on the border between the two of them and sent up a mushroom cloud. Thank God NASA reached both of them in time to tell them it was a large meteorite they had been tracking or the idiots would have vapourised the whole sub continent.

If India wants our uranium, then giving up it's nuclear weapons is the first step. Second step, is media scrutiny of Indian nuclear safety.

Not only sea water Mark, but smokestack emission as well, and quite easy to extract!
Yet where are those activists on coal!
It's not Nuclear that is melting the tundra, but fossil fuels.
So why not sell some non-carbon fuels to the worst emitters!
And allow the world to reduce the TOTAL carbon emission that is currently melting the formerly frozen permafrost!
Or if the activists get their way; burn even more coal instead, to deliver just 20% of the power, that we could create, turning onsite biological waste into energy.
And save a few million trees in the process.
If the anti nuke brigade were fair dinkum, they would be putting their money where their million mile wide mouths are, and funding some of these very alternative affordable projects, where they claim the greatest harm is being done.
Part of the problem is ignorance and people who just don't get it. i.e., a nuclear power station cooling pond, is not for drinking or bathing in!
And if clearly understood pictorial signs are just ignored, it's hardly the fault of the power authority.
And lifting millions out of poverty, is never ever entirely risk free!
And a very small activist minority, have cried wolf to the point, where no one now listens!
Rhrosty.

Dear LEGO

Thank you for asking the question.

"If India wants our uranium, then giving up it's nuclear weapons is the first step. Second step, is media scrutiny of Indian nuclear safety"

LEGO, since the world is so untrusting or paranoid or primeval as it might be the case ....there's not much we can do about it. Business being the lower point of humanity, does bring about the ideas as it does cloud the commitments to our direction.

Some might say..."just keep going"...as for disarming...it will never happen.

Tally

The reality is that raw uranium forms about 0.02c per kWhr of the cost of generating nuclear power, and about .0001% of the cost of building a warhead. Russia built about 40 000 nuclear warheads before buying an ounce of uranium from Aus, and the sale of raw uranium has no chance of being a deterrent.

India and Russia have many sources of uranium, the question is who will make a profit and employ their people selling it?