US PRESIDENT George Bush will invite Australia to be part of two initiatives aimed at guaranteeing future energy supplies: his global nuclear partnership and an initiative to produce ethanol from wild grasses.
Both issues will be raised by Mr Bush at bilateral talks ahead of the APEC meeting next week, senior officials said.
Prime Minister John Howard will today outline his objectives for APEC in an address to the Lowy Institute. The timing of the September 8-9 meeting is politically important — the election could be announced as early as a week or fortnight later.
The US, through the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, is already driving a major research effort to develop a new generation of fast-cycle reactors that would produce far less hazardous waste than conventional nuclear reactors. The group includes many countries involved in the nuclear fuel cycle, including Russia, China and France.
Its broader aim is to eventually secure the entire fuel cycle and confine production and reprocessing to members of the group, thus reducing the threat of nuclear proliferation.
Australia and Canada, the world's largest uranium producers, have so far stalled on joining because of domestic concerns about obligations to take back nuclear waste and store it.
They have also been concerned about being locked out of a core group inside the partnership that is allowed to process uranium, say diplomatic sources.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mr Howard are likely to compare notes in a bilateral meeting around APEC.
A senior official said last week that the US would not pressure Australia to take back nuclear waste if it joined the group.
"We want Australia to be part of the research effort. It doesn't mean Australia would have to take back nuclear waste," the official said. Documents reveal that the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Energy have worked on a bilateral nuclear partnership with the US, which would see closer research ties and more involvement by Australia.
Hans Blix, the head of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission who is visiting Melbourne, said there were "attractive features" in the partnership initiative, which aims to reduce proliferation by confining uranium production to a small group of countries.
Yet he said it remains a "hypothetical" plan and noted that the US has been averse to taking back fuel.
"GNEP is pretty much far in the future, there are many things that need to be clarified and worked out before they can get to such a scheme. It presupposes new types of reactors … the type of reactors we don't have yet," Dr Blix told The Age.
Ethanol will also be a major area of discussion. The US has announced a program to boost ethanol production to 35 billion gallons by 2017, in a bid to reduce its dependence on foreign oil by 20 per cent.
Also see related article in Sydney Morning Herald.
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