Australia and India will hold the third round of their civil nuclear cooperation talks on November 26-27, 2013. This should lead to a civil nuclear cooperation agreement between Australia and India. The main area of cooperation will be the export of Australian uranium to India. The uranium is exported in the form of uranium concentrate powder which is yellow in colour (hence called "yellowcake"). In chemical terms yellowcake is about 80% uranium oxide.

India is in the unique position of being a de facto Nuclear Weapons State that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This anomaly is due to India being a great power that could not (due to its colonial status in 1944-45) become an original permanent member (P5) of the UN Security Council (UNSC). India has not (yet) been accepted as a 6th permanent member of the UNSC.

P5 status is mainly based on international acceptance that a country is legitimately a great power with nuclear weapon ownership being an aspect of power.

As a non-P5 power India effectively did not qualify to become an official Nuclear Weapon State under the NPT. It should be remembered that the P5 great powers organised the NPT (with its exploded bomb by 1967 requirement) to make themselves the only legal Nuclear Weapons States.

India's more recent great power status and prominence as a nuclear commerce customer qualifies it in the eyes of Russia, France the US and UK to be a de facto Nuclear Weapons State.

India's non-signatory status regarding the NPT and likelihood some Uranium imports might find their way into India's nuclear weapons program makes for the unusual regulatory and technical problems. The main regulatory problem is that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is mainly tasked with preventing non-Nuclear Weapons States from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.

It is rather pointless for the IAEA to attempt to apply non-Nuclear Weapons State rules to India when India already has nuclear weapons.

The following article is by Stephanie March from ABC Online, dated November 19, 2013  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-19/australia27s-nuclear-deal-with-india/5101030

Nuclear deal: Australia's uranium deal with India may include  weaker monitoring safeguards

A third round of nuclear cooperation agreement talks are due to take place later this month and both governments say they want the deal settled quickly.

In the past, Australia has required countries to which it sells uranium to track the material more closely than is required by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Andrew Davies from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute says the IAEA tracks aggregate quantities of uranium but does not monitor exactly where uranium sent to India from Australia ends up.
"For example, if 100 tonnes goes into a civilian nuclear program and 90 tonnes of product comes out, they don't know where the missing product was diverted from," he said.

The ABC understands India says it does not have the capacity to provide additional monitoring beyond what is required by the IAEA.

Speaking in New Delhi, Australia's Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, told the ABC she was reluctant to comment on the talks while they were underway. "I am not going to get ahead of the negotiations and consider hypotheticals," she said. "We have our negotiating team coming here shortly and I am confident that we will be able to conclude an agreement that satisfies Australian standards," she said.

When asked if she could guarantee the agreement would be as strong as Australia's other nuclear cooperation agreements, Ms Bishop said "we will always act in Australia's national interests".

Relations between Australia and India soured when the Rudd-government cancelled plans to sell uranium to India as it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Gillard government reversed that position in a move supported by the Coalition. India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and only in recent years started taking steps to separate its military and civilian nuclear programs. Last year, a report from the Indian auditor-general found the country's nuclear safety regulator was weak and unable to properly monitor the industry.

Ms Bishop says Australia will support India joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group."

Comment

India's Economic Times has a useful sequence of earlier articles on Australia-India nuclear cooperation, including:

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-11-18/news/44202266_1_australian-uranium-india-and-australia-npt just prior to the Third Round of talks,

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-07-12/news/40536596_1_uranium-sale-australian-uranium-peaceful-purposes on the Second Round of talks, and

see the lower left side-bar of Economic Times for additional Australia-India articles.
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Pete