Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette made his first splash on the international stage this week, weaving some tough talk about Iran and North Korea into a speech at a United Nations nuclear security conference in Vienna, Austria.
“We call on Iran to fully cooperate with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] in monitoring and inspecting Iran’s facility, and in addressing all of the agency’s questions related to the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declaration,” Brouillette, who took office in December, said in prepared remarks to energy ministers and audience members gathered for the U.N. agency’s first International Conference on Nuclear Security since 2016.
The Donald Trump administration in 2017 ceased abiding by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Iran nuclear deal, negotiated by the Barack Obama administration. The agreement, which was not a treaty but rather a multilateral political deal between seven heads of state, lifted international economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for curbs on the nation’s production of nuclear materials.
Iran has retaliated by promising to increase production of enriched uranium, but so far has not barred the IAEA from the country or formally ceased complying with the 2015 agreement.
Brouillette told his international colleagues that “Global commitment must also extend to pressing North Korea to meet its commitment at the Singapore Summit to work towards complete denuclearization.”
President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator, met in Singapore in June 2018 as part of Trump’s bid to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program — something the hermit state has neither done nor announced plans to do. It was the second formal nuclear summit between the two countries.
Meanwhile, Brouillette urged U.N. members states to “continue providing IAEA with the necessary resources it needs to accomplish the various activities within its nuclear security mandate.
“We must universalize relevant nuclear and radiological security instruments, including the amended Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, and the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism,” Brouillette said in a webcast speech.
Also at the conference this week, the NNSA made several announcements on nonproliferation and nuclear security initiatives, including:
- Belgium’s commitment to convert a reactor that makes medical isotopes to run on low-enriched uranium by 2022. Belgian Reactor-2 in Mol currently uses highly enriched uranium to produce isotopes including molybdenum-99.
- The formation by NNSA and Belgium’s Federal Agency for Nuclear Control of a working group to promote greater awareness of insider threats to national radiological and nuclear materials.
- The end of the five-year, joint U.S.-Canada drive to move more than 200 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from Canadian research reactors to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The effort, covered in detail nearby in this week’s NS&D Monitor, was part of the NNSA’s Nuclear Material Removal Program.
- Touting the continued cooperation between the U.S. and Japan on improving the security international transportation of nuclear material, and promoting workshops on the topic scheduled this year in Colombia and Romania.
