AUSTRALIA is one step closer to exporting uranium to Russia, after the government rejected concerns raised by a Labor-dominated committee into an export agreement reached by John Howard and Vladimir Putin.

Eighteen months to the day after the joint standing committee on treaties recommended against ratifying the agreement, the government responded that existing safeguards were strong enough to ensure uranium sales to Russia would not be stolen or used in weaponry.

Mr Howard, then prime minister, and Mr Putin, then president and now Prime Minister, signed the uranium treaty in September 2007. But the committee, chaired by the Labor MP Kelvin Thomson, recommended a year later the government not ratify the agreement until a number of strict conditions were met.

The committee's report was lauded by anti-nuclear campaigners for challenging an assurance by the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office that uranium exports would be safely monitored.

''While the committee notes the [office's] assurances, the committee also notes … the [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards failed to discover the efforts of Iraq and Libya to develop nuclear weapons,'' the report said. But late yesterday the government said it was satisfied with existing conditions on uranium exports. It said it could not not ensure that IAEA inspectors monitored Russian facilities because this was a matter for the agency.

The response said there was little chance Australian uranium would be used to make nuclear weapons, partly because Russia was already reducing its stockpile of plutonium that could be used in warheads.

''It is highly unlikely that Russia would, on the one hand, dispose of its enormous surplus stocks of fissile material and, on the other hand, seek to divert uranium from Australia or elsewhere and subject such uranium to all the processing required in order to produce material suitable for a weapon.''

David Noonan, of the Australian Conservation Foundation, criticised the government's response. ''It appears as if the Rudd Labor government is endorsing the Howard-Putin deal,'' Mr Noonan said.

He said it was ''not credible'' for the government to claim that there was sufficient transparency in the Russian system to know what would happen to uranium once it was exported there.

Mr Thomson said yesterday the government's was a ''serious and considered response to a serious and considered report''.