BOMBAY: Even as India prefers to go slow on the proposed sale of 10MY experimental reactor to Iran under mounting pressure from the US. is program of marketing nuclear knowhow has suffered another setback as the other potential buyer from the Arab world, Egypt, has conveyed its inability to go for nuclear reactor owing to financial constraints.

Top sources in the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) have [confirmed that a message to that effect has been received from Egypt. The India Egypt deal was fixed at $70 million which is con severed quite competitive in the international market. A reactor in the same category for instance of a German make, costs between $130 million to $150 million, Egypt was the first nation to respond to the offer made by India’s Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Dr. P.K. lyengar, to sell small reactors for peaceful experiments at the last annual meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (AEA) in Vienna.

Right from the initial stages of the deal real pressure was on India on desist from marketing the nuclear technology. Although both the deal extra precautions were taken to maintain secrecy about [ran asa buyer. The deals also differed in the sense that which Egypt decided to buy 3 [5 MV reactor, Iran opted for the 10 MV reactor.

Egypt’s decision came as a damper to the nuclear technologists at the BARC who were looking ahead to reach over $200 million from the sale of these two reactors. One of them pointed out that recently Bangladesh had bought spectrometers worth over $150 million from India. It was thought that the deal would give impetus to India’s ambitious nuclear marketing program.

A top DAE official pointed out that Iran already possesses an experimental reactor of 5 MW capacity (located near Teheran) bought by it during the Shah’s regime from the US in the sixties, Therefore, the proposed sale of a 10 MW reactor under the IAE”s safeguards would not make any difference. Moreover, there is no assurance that Iran would not try 10 procure a nuclear reactor through a sacred deal Several nations in the world, though signatories to the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), have sold this technology secretly in the past.

But there is little hope that the US Under Secretary, Reginald Bartholomew, who will be mainly discussing the reactors sale and the NPT, will be convinced by the India’s case.

Article extracted from this publication >> November 29, 1991