russia warning on uranium deal

Russia warning on uranium deal
2-September-08 by AAP


06:32am | Russia warning on uranium deal
06:32am | Today's Business HeadlinesRussia has warned Australia not to withdraw from a $1 billion-a-year deal to sell it Australian uranium as Labor MPs express concern over the superpower's aggression in Georgia last month.

Former prime minister John Howard and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin signed the uranium deal at the APEC meeting a year ago.

The mineral export is intended for civilian nuclear power use and would not be used to make nuclear weapons either in Russia or in another country, Mr Putin has said.

But Labor MP Kelvin Thomson, chairman of parliament's treaties committee, has said Mr Putin could not be trusted with Australian uranium, Fairfax newspapers said today.

"If you've looked on the TV into Vladimir Putin's eyes -- he is one tough son of a gun and I don't think that he cares about what we think," said Mr Thomson.

"I think that we could supply uranium to him and if he changed his mind about the uses to which he was going to put it, I don't think we'd have any effective comeback at all."

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the government had expressed its concerns to Moscow about the Georgian invasion, and would take that into account and the views of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties when it considers ratifying the uranium agreement.

But he said the safeguards in the agreement were more than adequate.

"The government believes that the agreement meets Australia's longstanding safeguards requirements and promotes the highest international standards in this area, including involvement and oversight by the international regulator, the International Atomic Energy Agency," he said.

Russia's ambassador in Canberra, Alexander Blokhin, warned the government not to go back on the deal.

"If this agreement is not ratified, in that case we could regard it as an obviously politically biased decision, which could harm the economic interest of Australia as well," Mr Blokhin told Fairfax through an interpreter.

"We do not see any connection between the events in the Caucasus region and the uranium deal. These are completely separate things."