§6322 IAEA internal reforms

Summary

Congress asks the President to talk with other countries and groups, including the IAEA Board of Governors and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, so the IAEA will adopt a set of early safeguards reforms. Those reforms ask the IAEA to get better access to nuclear sites that can make weapons material. They ask the IAEA to meet its goals for detecting theft or diversion of materials, especially where there is a lot of plutonium, and to say publicly if it cannot meet a goal. The IAEA would be able to fine violators, pay rewards, and run a hotline for reports. Safeguards would cover factories that make equipment or material for producing special fissionable material, research and development sites, and undeclared facilities with authority for challenge inspections. The reforms would add tritium, uranium concentrates, nuclear waste with fissile material, and more heavy-water checks. They would lower the IAEA’s minimum amounts of material needed for a bomb and make those amounts national standards. The IAEA would place more full-time inspectors at sensitive fuel-cycle sites, use near-real-time accounting where large amounts of material are handled, speed up visas for inspectors, get more money and technical and political support, and publish an annual safeguards report plus public registries of nuclear trade goods and member countries’ trade-control laws and enforcement actions.