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. Buying the material from Iran, the White House reasons, decreases the likelihood it will be used by that country for nuclear weapons. Some of material will be used at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and DOE also expects to sell a portion.
Moniz spoke less than a week after the U.S. Senate approved its fiscal 2017 energy and water funding bill, which nearly died on the floor because 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.
