WASHINGTON — Following the passage of the Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act in July and the increased interest in nuclear energy, industry advocates say an export process led by the State Department with help from the Department of Energy needs to improve.
The Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, which President Joe Biden (D) signed in July, has one overt directive for the Department of Energy: find ways other than the gold-standard, civil-nuclear 1-2-3 agreement to help get special nuclear materials to aspirant nuclear-power users abroad.
“There’s 30 plus countries developing nuclear for the first time, most of them we don’t have 1-2-3 agreements with,” Ted Jones, senior director of national security and international programs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said in an interview with the Monitor. “So… that’s going to put a lot of pressure on this… specific authorization process.”
The State Department is the lead on 1-2-3 agreements and DOE, including its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency’s in-house expert on weaponizable nuclear material, is a technical consultant. A 1-2-3 agreement is essentially the federal government’s way of locking down a promise that a country will not make weapons with imported U.S.nuclear technology or material.
But waiting seven months to a year to finalize a 1-2-3 agreement is “not a way to be competitive” amid the nuclear renaissance that many see unfolding around the globe, Jones said.
Paul Dickman, an external affairs committee chair at the American Nuclear Society (ANS), recently retired policy fellow at the Argonne National Laboratory and a former deputy director for NNSA’s Office of Policy, said in a separate interview that the 1-2-3 agreement process was “cumbersome, and viewed as impediment by the industry” because of the length of the approval process.
“If we want to be the global leader for this upcoming generation, we need to have a strong role in the commercial markets,” Jones said.
And according to one attendee of the Exchange Monitor’s Nuclear Energy Security Summit held here in Washington in late June, the U.S. is currently underwhelming potential overseas buyers.
“The U.S. has not done a great job in terms of advocating for ourselves and our technologies internationally,” Kirsten Cutler, a senior strategist for nuclear energy innovation at the State Department, said in a panel at the Nuclear Energy Security Summit. “The number of times I’ve heard [from other countries] ‘we’ve heard from Russia, we’ve heard from China, and we’ve heard from the Koreans, we have not seen the Americans.’ It’s striking and it’s sobering.”
“Unprecedented” interest in nuclear energy makes reform at DOE and the NNSA all the more important, according to Amy Roma, a trustee at ANS and Washington-based lawyer tracking on the ADVANCE Act.
Roma said she has seen NNSA show up to discussions, trying to brainstorm ways to increase nuclear-power deployment while ensuring the material being deployed is safe, and that NNSA is “protecting the world from proliferation issues.”
“If nuclear energy is a part of the solution to the global climate crisis, and I strongly believe that it is, then it is crucial that nonproliferation safeguards and security are baked into the expansion of the global commercial nuclear sector,” NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said in her keynote address at the Monitor’s 2022 Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
Right now, the NNSA’s regime of reactor-centered nonproliferation tools include the International Nuclear Security for Advanced Reactors program, which partners with aspirant U.S. nuclear companies to discuss “safety, security, and safeguards” to help improve safety features of future U.S.-exported nuclear reactors in the design stages, an agency spokesperson told the Monitor in an email that
A separate but related NNSA program, the Advanced Reactor International Safeguards Engagement program, meets with advanced nuclear reactor stakeholders, the same spokesperson said.
NNSA also has the Proliferation Resistance Optimization (PRO-X) program, which project manager Kylie Sallee and an NNSA spokesperson said in a video interview works with international partners and vendors to incorporate nonproliferation and safety principles into new research reactor designs with aims to “minimize the potential production of weapons usable nuclear material while optimizing reactor performance.”
Other federal agencies are also trying to get the industry up to speed about nuclear exports. Among them, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency planned to host a civil-nuclear workshop at DOE’s Oak Ridge lab in October.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has recently entered a 1-2-3 agreement with the Philippines, signed a nuclear technology deal with Singapore and, only this week, reached an agreement to help the African nation Ghana build a small modular reactor made by NuScale Power.
“These partnerships help promote responsible international deployment of U.S. advanced reactor technologies while supporting technological innovation in line with international nuclear security legal obligations and host country requirements,” an NNSA spokesperson said in an email to the Monitor.
Section 105 of the ADVANCE Act specifically requires:
- The secretary of state and the secretary of energy to identify, within 90 days of enacting the act, other “factors” for determining a country’s “generally authorized destination status” for exporting nuclear material, other than 1-2-3 agreements for cooperation in section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act
- The secretary of energy to review and update the DOE’s process for determining a country’s “generally authorized destination” status under part 810 of title 10 in the Code of Federal Regulations. Under part 810, DOE “authorize[s] persons to directly or indirectly engage or participate in the development or production of special nuclear material outside the United States.”
- The secretary of energy to amend the list of countries identified as a “generally authorized destination” in part 810 one year after the enactment of the ADVANCE Act, and every five years thereafter.
