India, Australia seal uranium exports deal

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese announced the conclusion of a deal for the supply of uranium on July 9.

• Building on the Australia-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement signed in 2015, both Prime Ministers welcomed finalisation and signature of the administrative arrangement, which will enable long-term Australian uranium exports to India for exclusively peaceful purposes and under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.

• The arrangement facilitates Australian uranium exports to India to help increase the share of non-fossil fuel power capacity.

• This development comes at a time when India is aiming to scale up its nuclear power capacity.

• Australia’s uranium reserves are the world’s largest, with around one-third of global resources.

• Australia is also the world’s fourth largest producer behind Kazakhstan, Canada and Namibia. 

Key facts about Uranium:

• Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive element, which has the atomic number of 92 and corresponds to the chemical symbol U in the periodic table. 

• It belongs to a special group of elements called “actinides” — elements that were discovered relatively late in history.

• Like all other actinides, uranium is “radioactive” – it decays over time and releases energy in the process. 

• Its special properties make uranium the main source of fuel for nuclear reactors — a chicken-egg sized amount of uranium fuel can provide as much electricity as 88 tonnes of coal.

• Just like any other element, uranium comes in several variations that differ in mass and physical properties but share the same chemical properties. Those are called isotopes.

• There are three natural isotopes of uranium — uranium-234 (U-234), uranium-235 (U-235) and uranium-238 (U-238). 

• U-238 is the most common one, accounting for around 99 per cent of natural uranium found on Earth. 

• Most nuclear reactors use fuels containing U-235. However, natural uranium typically contains only 0.72 per cent of U-235. Most reactors need a higher concentration of this isotope in their fuel. 

• Therefore, the U-235 concentration is being artificially increased through a process called enrichment. 

• Uranium enrichment is the process, through which the isotopic proportion of U-235 is increased from 0.72 per cent to up to 94 per cent. 

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants.)