Heavy water from Iran arrived in late August at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee for storage before being distributed to end users, according to the Department of Energy.
The controversial purchase of 32 tons of heavy water was carried out under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement between Iran and six world powers — China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — intended to ensure the Middle Eastern state’s nuclear program is conducted solely for peaceful ends.
Heavy water can be used in civilian nuclear operations, but can also be combined with uranium to produce weapon-usable plutonium. That was a key concern surrounding operation of Iran’s sole heavy-water reactor at Arak, which as of early 2016 was filled with cement following removal of the reactor core.
The Department of Energy’s Isotope Program paid roughly $8.6 million in euros for the heavy water, DOE said Tuesday.
The JCPOA requires Iran to redesign and rebuild the Arak heavy-water reactor; focus on using light water for future power and research reactors; not to build any new heavy-water reactors or accumulate the material for 15 years; and make all excess domestic heavy water available for export to foreign buyers.
In an earlier statement Friday, the Department of Energy said there were no plans for additional purchases of Iranian heavy water: “The U.S. will not be Iran’s customer forever. It is exclusively Iran’s responsibility to find a way to meet its JCPOA commitments, whether that is by selling, diluting or disposing of future stocks of heavy water to remain within the JCPOA limit.”
Six tons of the heavy water will be used at the Oak Ridge lab’s Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), which produces neutrons to support scientific disciplines including physics, chemistry, materials science, and biology. The lab previously had not been able to acquire enough heavy water for its research needs, including several tons of the material from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The rest will be resold to commercial and research customers, providing much of the U.S. domestic industrial and research requirements for 2016, DOE said.
The department did not identify specific buyers for the material. “Heavy water is a critical product that can be used in a variety of industry, medical and research applications, including in the development of certain semiconductor devices and for nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI),” according to its statement Tuesday.
Russia has also been in talks to purchase 40 metric tons of heavy water from Iran, according to reports as recent as July.
Payment of any U.S. funds to Iran in the more than a year since the JCPOA was sealed has proven highly controversial in Washington, D.C., highlighted recently by congressional Republicans’ criticism of a $400 million “ransom” paid to Tehran in January just as four Americans were being released from the country. The money – which was the focus of a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing Thursday — was part of a $1.7 billion pot owed after 1970s arms sales to Iran were canceled in the wake of the 1979 revolution.
An amendment from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) against purchases of heavy water from Iran temporarily held up passage of the Senate fiscal 2017 energy appropriations bill this spring. The amendment was eventually stripped from the legislation, though the immediate future of the DOE funding itself remains unclear as the end of fiscal 2016 approaches.
A bill from Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) to prohibit any federal entity in any fiscal year from spending money on Iranian heavy water passed the House in July and was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Pompeo’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.
