The Obama administration’s $8.6 million payment to Iran for 32 metric tons of heavy water was conducted absolutely transparently, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Monday.
The deal was reported to Congress and discussed with lawmakers, Moniz said during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “There was no mystery about it, no secrecy. It’s done. The material has arrived. Everything has been fine.”
Under the multilateral 2015 agreement intended to halt Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapon activities, the nation was limited to no more than 130 metric tons of heavy water to be used for startup of its redesigned and rebuilt Arak nuclear reactor. “In the spirit of trying to get things moving,” Moniz said, the U.S. bought some of Iran’s surplus; it arrived late last month at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, with 6 tons to be used at the site’s Spallation Neutron Source and the rest sold to industrial customers.
Heavy water can be mixed with uranium to produce weapon-usable plutonium, which had been a fear surrounding the original Arak reactor, which as of this year has been filled with cement following extraction of the reactor core. Moniz noted the material also has a number of industrial and scientific uses.
The heavy water deal itself proved controversial on Capitol Hill, at one point holding up Senate passage of the fiscal 2017 energy and water appropriations bill. However, new criticism has focused on the acknowledgement that the United States in April paid for the heavy water via wire transfer even while President Barack Obama and other administration officials said other post-nuclear deal payments to Iran had to be made in cash due to the nation’s financial isolation.
Moniz made his comments during a question-and-answer session in response to a query from a staffer for Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), one of many GOP critics of the deal, regarding the way the payment was made.
The U.S. paid in cash a $1.7 billion tranche long owed after 1970s arms sales to Iran were canceled in the wake of the 1979 revolution, Politico reported Sunday. Republicans have described payment of $400 million of that amount as a ransom for the release of Americans held in Iran, and potentially providing further incentive for hostage-taking by a state sponsor of terrorism. The administration has said the money was leverage but was owed to Iran in any case.
“The administration could have licensed a transaction through the international financial system. It would have taken maybe a week more. It might not have been timed for the release of these hostages, but it certainly could have been done that way, should have been done that way,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said during a hearing last week.
Moniz said at the Council on Foreign Relations event that the Treasury Department would have to provide details about how the heavy water payment was made. “But I do want to emphasize that this was all licensed by Treasury, as have been other commercial interactions with Iran.”
In a prepared statement Monday, the Treasury Department said: “In the months following the lifting of sanctions under the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], Iran began to gain incremental access to the international financial system, which opened up more options for executing transactions, such as the heavy water transaction. No direct transfer was made from the U.S. to Iran.”
The House in July passed legislation from Pompeo that would prohibit any federal entity in any fiscal year from spending money on Iranian heavy water. The bill is now before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for consideration.
The House on Thursday also voted 254-163 to approve legislation from Royce that would bar any cash payments to Iran.
