First, let’s take a look at today’s report in The Indian Express,
Pressing India to speed up implementation of the nuclear agreement, three influential US Senators on Wednesday said the negotiations with IAEA and Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) should be wound up by May failing which New Delhi will not get a “similar” deal. Senators Joseph Biden, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, who met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh here, said if the deal is not taken up the US Congress by June and the process completed during the tenure of President George W Bush, any new US administration will “renegotiate” the deal.
They talked about the possibility of Indo-US relations being impacted if the deal does not go through, saying there could be “misunderstanding” in India and questions as to whether the failure was deliberate by the US Congress.
There are many people who will say that the nuclear deal should go through and that the communists are unpatriotic idiots serving their Chinese masters (which they are!).
To be frank, in the beginning, even I supported the nuclear deal. But then, an article by Arun Shourie in The Indian Express really changed my opinion. He showed that every argument that the UPA government has put forward in favour of the N-deal is a fabrication, or at best, an exaggeration of facts.
Here is a small excerpt,
The fabrications in regard to uranium
The argument that we need nuclear power would not have been enough to justify the deal — for the response could have been, “All right, use domestically available uranium to generate it.” Hence, two further myths were fomented: we are woefully short of uranium; such uranium as we have is of poor quality.
The authoritative compilation on uranium supplies is what is known as the Red Book of the IAEA and OECD. The latest one — published in 2005/06 — records India’s uranium reserves as being 94,000 tonnes. Of these, 64,000 tonnes are what are termed as ‘RARs’, Reasonably Assured Reserves; and 30,000 tonnes are EAR-I, that is, ‘Estimated Additional Reserves’. Currently we are using 1,334 tonnes a year. By every stretch, these are enough to see us through to the time we will master fast breeder and thorium technologies. What is probably the best available study of the potential of these reserves, Atoms for War? (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006) has been done, in fact, by one of the architects of the deal, Ashley Tellis. In it, he shows that India has more than enough uranium — even if it were to aim in the coming decades at a nuclear arsenal of 2023 to 2228 weapons.
Now see how the twin myths are formented. The Planning Commission’s Integrated Energy Policy states: “India is poorly endowed with uranium. Available uranium supply can fuel only 10,000 MW of Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors. Further, India is extracting uranium from extremely low grade ores (as low as 0.1 per cent uranium) compared to ores with up to 12-14 per cent uranium in certain resources abroad.” Notice the sleight of words: our average — 0.1 per cent — is compared to other unspecified countries’ highest, their “up to…”
The facts are more reassuring! The most important suppliers of uranium are Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada — half the world’s output comes from them. The most recent account of uranium reserves, put out as recently as November 2, 2007, again by the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that it is only in Canada that the ore — about a fifth of it — is above the 1 per cent grade. “In Australia, on the other hand, some 90 per cent of uranium has a grade less than 0.06 per cent. Much of Kazakhstan’s ore is less than 0.1 per cent.”
You can read the full articles here:
Part I: Necessity is the mother of fabrication too
Part II: The fabrications of government
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