nuclear-news

Japan-India nuclear deal sounds good, but not likely in practice

Much-feted Indo-Japan nuclear deal isn’t all that it’s made out to be and will mean little when implemented, First Post by Jaideep Prabhu  Dec 13, 2015 News of an agreement on civil nuclear cooperation between India and Japan has been met with much fanfare in the Indian media. The announcement came on the second morning of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s three-day trip to India to attend the ninth annual India-Japan Summit. Despite the celebratory tone in India, the fine print and context of what was agreed upon between the two nations is less than satisfactory and will mean little in practice.

The nuclear deal has been a sensitive subject between Delhi and Tokyo for the past five years. ………

Japan holds an important position in international nuclear commerce. Over the years, the island nation has developed expertise in manufacturing several critical reactor components of high quality and become a key node in the supply chains of at least three of the major nuclear vendors, namely the French firm Areva and the American firms General Electric and Westinghouse. Among the major players, only Russia’s Rosatom and China’s two major state-run nuclear vendors – China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) and China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) – are independent of Japanese components. As per Japan’s strict export controls stipulating end-user certification and other conditions, US and French nuclear firms would first need the permission of their Japanese suppliers before doing business with India. Tokyo’s consonance on nuclear cooperation with India thus achieved a greater import, not to mention the symbolic value India put on such an agreement as an indicator of its nuclear normalisation.

The declaration at the India-Japan Summit falls considerably short of a nuclear deal. The two sides merely signed a memorandum of understanding that has punted the legal and technical differences further down the road. In essence, this means that Japan has only agreed to the principle that it can conclude a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India, that it will make an exception to its rule of not conducting nuclear commerce with a state that is not a signatory of the NPT. This is progress, no doubt, but what price Japan will extract for its concession in terms of technical requirements or how long the nuclear deal will take to operationalise is anyone’s guess……

December 14, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, marketing of nuclear