The two senators who ordered a report about the Donald Trump administration’s attempts to sell nuclear power technology to Saudi Arabia said this week they would consider changing the law to mandate more transparency from the White House about such efforts.
In a joint statement Monday, Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said they would “explore legislative changes” to the Atomic Energy Act, as recommended in a just-published report from the Government Accountability Office.
In a 45-page report Menendez and Rubio requested about a year ago, Congress’ investigative arm recommended lawmakers “consider amending the Atomic Energy Act to require regularly scheduled briefings” about potential nuclear power exports. The law already requires the White House to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about nuclear cooperation, but does not require regular updates.
The Government Accountability Office delivered the report to Menendez and Rubio last month, but only published it this week.
The State Department concurred with the office’s recommendation. There was no comment on the recommendation from the Energy Department, Commerce Department, or Nuclear Regulatory Commission, overseer of U.S. nuclear-power companies.
The State Department is supposed to lead negotiations about nuclear-power exports, with the Department of Energy consulting on technical matters and nonproliferation concerns. However, Rubio and Menendez said DOE, under then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry, had a lead role in the talks with Riyadh: a circumstance for which the senators said they never received adequate explanation, and which they feared “might lead to an agreement without proper safeguards to prevent nuclear proliferation.”
Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act specifies that a nation that wants to buy U.S. nuclear-power hardware and expertise must certify that it will use the technology and knowledge only for peaceful uses, and that it will adhere to strict nonproliferation standards and allow inspections of its power plants.
Saudi Arabia is working to build a nuclear power program to augment its energy resources.
In its recent report, the Government Accountability Office said Washington and Riyadh “have not been able to resolve disagreements on several nonproliferation conditions, including Saudi Arabia agreeing to enrichment and reprocessing restrictions and signing an Additional Protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which would allow IAEA to obtain additional information about and access to Saudi nuclear activities.”
Congress’ investigative arm also said the Departments of Energy and State did not bring the congressional committees of jurisdiction into the loop about possible nuclear exports to Saudi Arabia until well after informal talks started in 2017 and formal negotiations began in 2018.
“[B]ased on our review of the documentation and interviews with congressional staff, it does not appear that the agencies [Energy and State] provided a briefing to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs or Senate Committee on Foreign Relations until more than a year after the last formal U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation negotiations in March 2018,” according to the new report.
Menendez and Rubio both serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Menendez is the panel’s ranking member. The two asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the Trump administration’s nuclear power negotiations with Saudia Arabia months after The Daily Beast broke the news that Perry had granted six Part 810 authorizations to U.S. companies — named for the section of the Atomic Energy Act that enables such authorizations — to export some unclassified civilian nuclear power technology to Saudi Arabia.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle grilled Perry about the decision that spring in budget hearings, with the allegedly Saudi-approved murder of journalist, regime critic, and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi still fresh in the public’s mind.
