Nuclear Agreement with Iran

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about our relations with Iran and the enforcement of the U.S.-Iran--the international nuclear deal.

Let me first start with a few observations to reinforce an important point: that Iran is neither our friend nor our ally. Just last Wednesday, as the international community marked the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as part of UNESCO's Holocaust Remembrance Day, when countries from around the world came together in solemn remembrance of the Shoah, united in a shared commitment that the atrocities of the Holocaust must never happen again, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, issued a very different proclamation. It came in the form of a video uploaded to his official Web site in which the narrator condemns the nations of the world for supporting Israel and questions the legitimacy and magnitude of the Holocaust.

Just a few days later, the Supreme Leader of Iran awarded medals to the members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps who detained American sailors last month under very dubious circumstances. The Iranian Supreme Leader, eager to use this incident for his own propaganda purposes, called them Medals of Conquest.

These two actions are despicable and not the sign of a nation ready to rejoin the international community. These actions by Iran's Supreme Leader are just the most recent in a series of provocations and reminders that the Iranian regime is neither Americas's ally nor friend.

A nation such as Iran that continues to suppress dissent, promotes terrorism on its regional neighbors, and blatantly disregards international law and norms, is a destabilizing force, a revolutionary regime not to be trusted. It is precisely for this reason--because we are deeply distrustful of Iran and its intentions--that we have to come together to rigorously, aggressively enforce the terms of the nuclear deal with Iran and push back on its bad behavior, from its support for terrorism, to its human rights abuses, to its illegal ballistic missile tests.

Today I wanted to focus on one of the most vital elements of the nuclear deal--the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the nuclear deal with Iran, which is the dramatic increase in access and surveillance that the International Atomic Energy Agency, or the IAEA, has gained through this agreement.

After implementation day was reached, one of the significant consequences of that milestone is not just that Iran has taken dramatic action to push back its own nuclear trajectory but that it has granted unprecedented access to the world's nuclear watchdog agency to monitor its compliance with the deal. As Congress, the administration, and the international community now focus on enforcing the terms of the JCPOA, it is worth taking a much deeper look at what exactly makes this IAEA access so unprecedented and so important to maintain.

I recently visited the headquarters of the IAEA in Vienna, Austria, with a delegation of eight Senators. This agency has a huge amount riding on its ability to successfully detect any Iranian cheating under this deal. It is no understatement to say that the very credibility of the IAEA is on the line as it monitors, inspects, and verifies the status of Iran's nuclear program--not just for a week, a month, or a year, but for decades into the future. I was pleased and reassured to see that they are using some of the very innovative inspection techniques developed at America's own National Laboratories. These are just a few of the topics I want to touch on in the minutes ahead.

The nuclear deal reached with Iran required that they provide the IAEA with around-the-clock, 24/7 access to monitor Iran's entire nuclear fuel cycle. What is a nuclear fuel cycle? It is all the different steps required to go from mining the raw ore to actually producing highly enriched uranium--from uranium mines, uranium mills, centrifuge production workshops, to every known and declared uranium enrichment site connected to Iran's nuclear program.

Simply put, before this agreement--before the JCPOA--Iran could have converted its uranium or its plutonium into material useful for a nuclear weapon. On implementation day, Iran disabled its Arak reactor. They filled the core of that reactor with concrete, shutting off the so-called plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon.

Today I will focus on the uranium pathway of the commercial nuclear fuel cycle, which includes the four parts I just mentioned--mills, mines, conversion facilities, and enrichment facilities. These different components of their entire fuel cycle are scattered across the nation of Iran, as you can see in the graphic to my right.

The fuel cycle begins at uranium mines where hundreds of tons of dirt, rocks, and ore which contain tiny, trace amounts of uranium-- typically just 0.1 percent--are dug up, blasted into smaller pieces, dumped into huge trucks, and then transported to the next stage, uranium mills.

Two mills exist in Iran near Gachin and Saghand. Under the JCPOA, the IAEA will maintain continuous access to these mills. In these uranium mills, the rocks retrieved from mines are then ground into dust from which uranium is extracted. This raw uranium ore concentrate is then transported--again, under the supervision of the IAEA--to a uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, where it is converted into uranium hexafluoride gas, or UF-6.

The final and most critical step of the fuel cycle takes place at so- called enrichment facilities where rapidly spinning centrifuges enrich uranium hexafluoride to the point where it can be used for research and development, industrial purposes, or, if enriched to a very high level as fissile material, it can be used for a nuclear weapon.

Critically, the nuclear deal gives the IAEA access to inspect and oversee every one of these stages, not just enrichment facilities, as other deals with other countries previously required. If the JCPOA only required the Iranians to give nuclear inspectors access to their enrichment facilities, Tehran could easily continue to mine, meld, convert, and then quite likely enrich uranium undetected elsewhere, such as undeclared secret facilities. That is why it is so important that mills, mines, and the whole rest of the fuel cycle are subject to regular inspections and continuous oversight. Access to the entire fuel cycle means that the IAEA--and thus the world--will know if Iran tries to move any nuclear material to undeclared covert facilities.

One of the biggest advances in this new, continuous monitoring approach is a whole new series of inspection techniques and technologies. It is not enough for nuclear inspectors themselves to be able to access every step of the fuel cycle because it is impossible for even the best inspectors to be physically present everywhere all of the time in a nuclear fuel cycle system as complex as Iran's. That is why effective oversight and enforcement demands that the IAEA be able to monitor enrichment efforts remotely and constantly. That level of monitoring is provided by the continuous real-time monitoring of all of Iran's declared nuclear facilities.

Here is one of the ways that works. The small device to my right here is an IAEA monitoring device--known as an online enrichment monitor, or an OLEM--which is installed at the Natantz fuel enrichment plant in Iran. The pipe labeled ``A'' is a processing pipe that transports gaseous uranium hexafluoride gas from cascades of spinning centrifuges. These centrifuges are the devices that take the uranium previously mined from the ground and then milled to be transformed or enriched into uranium possibly useful for either civilian or military purposes.

Inside the box at the bottom right, this ``B,'' is a gamma ray detector which measures the amount of uranium hexafluoride gas flowing through the centrifuge at key measurement points. These gamma ray detectors send continuous, real-time, 24/7 information to the IAEA so it can make sure that Iran's uranium enrichment levels remain at or below the agreed-upon 3.67 percent--dramatically lower than the 90 percent enrichment threshold required for fissile material useable for a weapon.

In addition to these gamma ray detectors, pressure and temperature sensors continuously monitor the present quantities of gaseous uranium hexafluoride gas. Measurements from these sensors, combined with data from the gamma ray detectors, allow the IAEA to effectively monitor all uranium enrichment. This monitoring equipment runs autonomously, has backup battery power to ensure reliability, and is encased, as you can see, in sealed containers that contain tamper-resistant equipment to allow the international community to know if Iran tries to alter or tamper with the monitoring equipment.

Before the IAEA developed and implemented these continuous monitoring devices, nuclear inspectors had only two options for verifying compliance: Send inspectors directly, physically into each facility to retrieve physical samples or attempt to measure compliance, even remotely, by taking environmental samples. As a stand-alone method, these two techniques were unreliable and time-intensive, requiring weeks to collect, ship, and analyze samples. Today, instead of waiting weeks or months for results, the IAEA now has real-time, around-the- clock access, so it is aware of exactly what Iran is doing at its enrichment facilities.

These nonstop monitoring devices that were recently developed will also be supplemented by traditional sampling and analysis performed in person by IAEA inspectors. Continuous monitoring devices are in place at all of Iran's uranium enrichment facilities, as well as every known site at which Iran mills and converts uranium and manufactures or stores centrifuges.

That represents every single location involved in Iran's fuel cycle-- except uranium mines. That is because real-time monitoring of a mine would serve no scientific purpose. Uranium mines consist of thousands of tons of raw dirt, rock, and ore. Only a minuscule amount of uranium is naturally present, and even that raw uranium is typically present in such tiny concentrations--just a fraction of a percent--that they are unusable without further processing and enrichment.

IAEA inspectors have regular access, as I have said, to all known uranium mines, and because of the huge amount of activity required to process and mine uranium, regular inspectors are more than sufficient to uncover and monitor Iran's behavior at mines.

Throughout Iran's nuclear facilities, the IAEA has also installed both still and video cameras. These cameras provide a 90-percent increase in the number of images generated per day compared to before the nuclear agreement, giving the international community another vital window into Iran's activities.

In addition, gamma ray monitors--as well as all nuclear material, centrifuges, and equipment--are all secured with tamper-evident seals to protect the integrity of the equipment.

In our Nation's history of dealing with rogue states seeking a nuclear weapons capability--from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Qadhafi's Libya to North Korea--there has never been an inspection protocol that allowed the IAEA this level of access to monitor and oversee every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. Under this level of oversight, to produce a nuclear weapon, Iran would need to construct an entirely separate fuel cycle--a whole supply chain, including mining, milling, conversion, and enrichment facilities--completely in secret--an exceptionally difficult undertaking.

But access alone is not enough. For us to be ensured that Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon, the IAEA must also have the resources to turn that access into effective oversight.

Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran must declare every nuclear and nuclear-related facility that exists within its borders. In response, inspectors have three roles: first, to confirm that Iran's site declarations are accurate and comprehensive; second, to monitor all declared sites to make sure Iran's behavior complies with the terms of the deal; and, third, to track material that leaves each facility to make sure Iran is not pursuing illicit nuclear activity at undeclared sites elsewhere in the country.

Inspectors have regular, complete access to every segment of the nuclear supply chain: conversion, enrichment, mines, mills, fuel manufacturing, the reactors themselves, and spent fuel. To reach the level of necessary oversight, the IAEA has increased its number of inspectors by 120 percent. But I will remind my colleagues that for the next 25 years or more, these physical inspections will have to be sustained to provide a critical supplement to the continuous monitoring technology I referenced before.

Even so, if the IAEA doesn't have enough capable nuclear scientists to effectively monitor, evaluate, and investigate every aspect of Iran's nuclear fuel cycle, the international community will not, for the decades to come, be able to effectively enforce the terms of the JCPOA.

It takes years to train capable nuclear scientists and even longer to develop new and better monitoring technologies.

As the name of the IAEA implies, fully supporting the IAEA requires support from each of our international partners. But Congress can and should take a step forward by providing reliable, continuous, long-term funding for the IAEA so they can increase the number of their fully trained and available inspectors. It would send a strong signal to both our allies and to Iran that we are serious about holding Iran to the terms of the deal not just this year but over the decades to come.

The IAEA needs the resources to do its job effectively and efficiently. Working effectively means the inspections are not only uncovering violations or potential violations of the deal but also deterring Iran from covert action by knowing with certainty that they will be caught. Working efficiently means the IAEA can devote as many resources as necessary to searching for undeclared sites and monitoring those that are known. To this end, I hope that when the President's budget is released next week, it will include a significant increase in resources for the IAEA.

Adequately funding the IAEA is something I will be speaking about in greater detail in the weeks to come, but it is also important to note that there is a direct correlation between our investments in Federal research and development--specifically, in our National Laboratories-- and our effectiveness in keeping Iran's nuclear ambitions and the threat of proliferation throughout the rest of the world in check.

For over 35 years--back to 1980--every single IAEA inspector has been trained at least once at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Idaho, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven National Labs are also part of the vital training network for IAEA inspectors. On average, our national labs are training 150 IAEA inspectors every year--about one- fifth of the entire inspection staff--every single year, developing key skills to keep us and the world safe, like learning how to make accurate, prompt measurements of nuclear material.

Our National Labs also play a key role in improving existing technologies and developing new ones that we can't even imagine today. The online enrichment monitors I described earlier, which will allow for continuous, real-time oversight of Iran's enrichment activities, were originally developed at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

In fact, most of America's 17 National Labs have supported or are currently supporting some element of the IAEA safeguards technology, both as individual labs and as part of a 10-nation, 20-lab network of analytical labs that include Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, Pacific Northwest, and New Brunswick National Labs.

In conclusion, congressional oversight is essential to the most stringent implementation of the nuclear deal with Iran and for our national security as a whole. Making investments in our National Labs and in Federal research and development today means better trained, better equipped nuclear inspectors for the years and the decades to come. Adequately funding the IAEA today means the international community takes full advantage of the unprecedented access we negotiated in this deal.

Effectively enforcing the JCPOA and pushing back on Iran's bad behavior today makes it clear that we intend to hold Iran accountable and to lay the groundwork for security for generations to come.

If we are serious about enforcing the terms of the nuclear deal, we need more than access; we need action.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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