The Department of Energy will proceed with plans to purchase Iranian heavy water, despite lingering sentiment in some quarters of Capitol Hill that it should not do so, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz assured an audience of journalists and Beltway insiders Wednesday morning.
It was a course of action that — despite sometimes strenuous objection in the U.S. Senate — has been all but inevitable since DOE announced last month it would purchase some 30 tons of heavy water from Tehran for more than $8 million in support of the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic.
“We said we would facilitate a first purchase, and a first purchase only of that,” Moniz said of the heavy water during a Playbook forum hosted by Politico. “We are still in the process of executing that first transaction,” said Moniz, adding the deal got done “for a relatively low total cost, and a very competitive set of commercial terms.”
Heavy water can be used to make plutonium, but it can also be used for scientific and industrial purposes. Some of the cache the U.S. plans to buy will be used to upgrade the Spallation Neutron Source at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee — a particle accelerator that creates neutrons useful for penetrating different materials to study their internal properties. What Oak Ridge does not use will be sold to U.S. industry at cost, Moniz said.
“The agreement with Iran, the JCPoA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], has required a dramatic rollback of the Iranian nuclear establishment,” Moniz said. “To do that, a whole bunch of stuff had to leave Iran: 10 tons of low-enriched uranium, 20-percent enriched uranium, heavy water, because we put a restriction on that as well.”
Moniz spoke less than a week after the U.S. Senate approved its fiscal $37.5 billion 2017 energy and water funding bill, which nearly died on the floor when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) proposed an amendment to the measure that would have forbidden DOE from using its 2017 appropriation to buy more heavy water from Iran.
Cotton withdrew his amendment after the White House threatened to veto the underlying bill because of the measure, and the spending proposal afterward passed the full Senate. The junior senator from Arkansas, however, “still wants to block future heavy water purchases from Iran,” his spokesperson said by email on Wednesday.
Cotton will have plenty of opposition on that front, always assuming the issue even comes up again in the Senate.
The Iranian nuclear dealer is widely perceived as a legacy issue for the Obama administration, and Senate Democrats have shown themselves willing to disrupt the appropriations process to protect that legacy; in late April and early May, the minority thrice filibustered the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill because of the Cotton amendment.
Eventually, even Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that wrote the Senate version of the legislation, said that while he recognized the legitimacy of Cotton’s concern, he would not support his colleague’s amendment because it threatened the entire appropriations process.
Alexander said the heavy water issue would best be considered by the Senate Foreign Relations or Armed Services committees, which have yet to schedule any hearings on the matter. In the meantime, while the Senate continues with policy hearings and confirmation hearings for senior agency positions, lawmakers in that chamber still have 11 more appropriations bills to pass and reconcile with the House by Sept. 30.
