DAE talks hard line on fuel
March 26, India and the United States began the formal negotiations to facilitate the Indo-US nuclear deal, with the department of atomic energy making it clear to the government that it could not accept a bilateal agreement. This bilateral agreement did not allow India to reprocess spent fuel, stockpile nuclear fuel and recognise its right to nuclear testing.
Still it is not clear whether the fairly detailed Indian draft submitted personally by foreign secretary Shivashankar Menon to the Bush administration in Washington has been taken on board by the US at the higher level, and is on the agenda for discussions now. The DAE is keeping what sources here describe as a hawk’s eye on the negotiations, with the nuclear establishment in no mood to allow any compromise on India’s security interests.
Dr.Anil Kakodkar chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and secretary, DAE, has taken a no-non-sense position on the 123 agreement. He siad in a recent interview thar they did not want to convert this voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests into a bilateral agreement.
The moratorium on nuclear testing, he made clear, was unilateral and voluntary. The US is seeking to make this binding through the bilateral agreement. The nuclear scientists had earlier raised the issue of stockpiling fuel as well, maintaining that the March 2006 separation plan had clearly provided for building stockpiles of fuel to meet the lifetime requirements of nuclear reactors placed under IAEA safeguards.
Dr.Kakodkar said that they needed everything to be built into the 123 agreement in a very explicit manner, so that their interests were protected. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had assured Parliament that all these concerns would be met through the 123 agreement.
