Legislation seeking to reform the process for entering into civil nuclear cooperation agreements with foreign countries is likely to be taken up once again by this Congress, according to a staffer for a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee. A bill that cleared the Foreign Affairs Committee in 2011 would have required countries to either forswear the use of enrichment and reprocessing and meet a series of nonproliferation standards or be subject to a vote in Congress. However, that bill was not taken up by the full House. Don MacDonald, Democratic staff for the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, indicated yesterday that similar legislation could come up this year. “I think that the basic bargain that the bill tried to strike, the main thrust of the legislation in my view, should be and will be seriously considered in the 113th Congress,” he said at a discussion on Capitol Hill yesterday organized by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and Foreign Policy Initiative.
MacDonald did not speculate on when such legislation could come up or who may introduce the bill. The Obama Administration is currently completing an interagency review on its policy regarding civil nuclear deals, but MacDonald said that lawmakers were unlikely to wait for the results of the review to move ahead with a bill. “The bill was introduced in the last Congress while this debate was ongoing,” he said. “As I’ve said before, I think one of the worst things we can do from a business perspective is to have uncertainty. So I would say that there is no compelling reason for Congress to wait until the Administration gets done doing whatever it is going to do.”