- 14 minutes ago
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00The IAEA director, General Rafael Gossi, was a guest on Bloomberg Surveillance.
00:04And at the moment, of course, there's no engagement.
00:09Nothing is happening.
00:10We are not getting any cooperation from Iran.
00:15Things, of course, degrade.
00:17We are losing institutional memory and knowledge, continuity of knowledge of what is happening there.
00:24There's a lot of material and highly enriched uranium, as you know very well.
00:30Meanwhile, the IAEA says it's observed construction activity at Iran's Pickaxe Mountain site,
00:34which is suspected of housing nuclear-related activities.
00:37Joining us now is Ernest Moniz, the former U.S. Secretary of Energy, former CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
00:41He is now the CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative.
00:44Secretary Moniz, thank you very much for being with us once again.
00:46I know that you know Dr. Gossi well.
00:48And I want to just ask you first, picking up on his complaints about access, sort of not having that,
00:54where does that leave the international community in assessing what is or isn't happening inside Iran at this point in
00:59time?
01:00Well, David, this is quite serious.
01:03I think, as you know, we have said consistently since 2015 to today that the most important part of the
01:102015 agreement with Iran
01:12was, in fact, establishing these extraordinary verification and transparency measures carried out by Rafael Grossi's team.
01:21So that's been pretty much shut down now for quite a few years.
01:24And as he emphasized, the loss of continuity of knowledge is extremely serious.
01:31Indeed, if an agreement is reached, that, of course, is very much in question at the moment.
01:36But even if reached, it's going to be extraordinarily difficult.
01:40Frankly, I don't know how to really restore the continuity of knowledge that has been lost.
01:46Can you remind us, one of the big criticisms of the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, was that, okay, yes,
01:52you have inspectors in there,
01:53but Iran is cheating.
01:54They're hiding things.
01:55They're not playing fair.
01:56But inspectors I've spoken to have said it doesn't matter.
01:59I mean, it does, but they can tell things just by being on the ground.
02:02Can you talk to us about the kinds of things inspectors can see, even if they're not being shown the
02:06whole picture?
02:08Well, first of all, I would question whether they're not being shown the whole picture in the sense that the
02:14extraordinary measures
02:16that I mentioned included something that's called the additional protocol.
02:20And what that means is that the IAEA, if it suspects a non-declared Iranian site,
02:28that is a place that could be being used for covert nuclear activity, they have the right to ask for
02:35access to that
02:36and with the JCPOA be granted that access in a relatively short period.
02:43So that's very, very important.
02:45What it does is it doesn't say that, you know, there's 100 percent certainty that you will see everything.
02:52No one can ever say that.
02:54But the bar gets raised very, very high, and the risks and the consequences of cheating on that by Iran
03:01would be extremely, extremely serious.
03:04So the inspectors, in addition, they earned the opportunity to use all of the modern technology,
03:14including not-so-modern technology like cameras, this kind of thing.
03:19But also what's very important is over time they get to know the people, the Iranians who are doing the
03:26work, et cetera.
03:28So the level of knowledge just keeps growing and growing and growing.
03:32It's very cumulative, and they learn how – they are very highly trained.
03:39In fact, it's well known that the United States is among many countries that play a role in training these
03:46inspectors,
03:46and they can sense when it's time to ask for access elsewhere.
03:52In fact, I've said, and I would repeat it, that, for example, if we reached a new agreement that said
03:59Iran is not going to enrich in the future,
04:02enrich uranium in the future, but we don't have something like the additional protocol, it's frankly meaningless.
04:09Because any country, including Iran, in my view, is much more likely to pursue a nuclear weapon through covert activity
04:17than through overt activity.
04:20I assume you've heard the certitude and bombast from this administration about the efficacy of those strikes on Iran's nuclear
04:26sites.
04:27And I wonder if you could talk a bit about what Rafael Grossi said is happening at this site, Pickaxe
04:31Mountain,
04:32and what that says just about the state of the country's nuclear program.
04:35We had Iran's president in New Delhi today talking about how no country's civilian nuclear program should be attacked by
04:41an outside force here.
04:43What do you make of this news, as reported by Mr. Grossi?
04:47Well, first of all, David, let me go back a step and say that, first of all, of course, with
04:53the 2015 agreement,
04:55the most strict nuclear provision was that Iran would be restricted to 300 kilograms of uranium enriched to no more
05:06than 3.67 percent.
05:09Very, very, very low enrichment and a low inventory.
05:15Unfortunately, when the United States withdrew from that agreement,
05:19we now face a situation where Iran has about 10 tons of enriched uranium
05:26and about half a ton, almost half a ton, enriched to 60 percent.
05:30My main point is that the 60 percent uranium is already directly usable in a nuclear bomb.
05:39There is kind of a fiction that is widely held that one needs to go all the way to so
05:46-called weapons grade,
05:4790 percent enriched, to have a weapon.
05:50That is not true.
05:51It's less efficient, but it's already there.
05:54I put that out because it means that the bombings of 2025 on those facilities clearly were aimed at not
06:07only dismantling their current enrichment capability
06:10or their then-current ability, but also at trying to make that 60 percent uranium not usable.
06:19I would say we don't know whether that is true or not.
06:23Now, that brings us to Pickaxe Mountain.
06:26What we don't know is whether, for example, some of that directly usable material is in Pickaxe Mountain,
06:36perhaps at a depth where even our biggest bombs, conventional bombs, cannot reach it.
06:42I would say, to my knowledge at least, and I don't have access to the classified material,
06:48but to my knowledge at least, we just don't know a lot of what's happening.
06:53And all the recent construction that you alluded to around Pickaxe Mountain is certainly of concern
06:59because they could be building factories.
07:02They could be building bombs, frankly, in there.
07:06We don't have much insight.
07:08The clearest insight would likely have to come today from human intelligence.
07:16And, of course, some of our allies, well, of course, Israel in particular,
07:20has shown a real ability to understand what's going on through human intelligence.
07:27Yeah, CSAS did an analysis of, to your point, what you can see externally.
07:31And they said they're looking at five key points of interest in the roads connecting them,
07:36indicating the site has shifted from active excavation towards probable internal construction
07:41and continued exterior reinforcement.
07:43I'm more familiar with Fouro and Natanz.
07:47I had not heard of this site before.
07:49What was there previously?
07:51Do we know?
07:53Well, it's close to Natanz, but it's a separate site.
07:57And the idea is that they are simply going deeper and deeper.
08:01And that's why these military actions, you know, buy some time,
08:09but it just drives them further underground.
08:12And Pickaxe Mountain is viewed as a very, very hard target.
08:16As I understand it, a lot of granite and very, very deep.
08:21So the United States showed in its bombing of, for example, the Isfahan facility and Fordow,
08:31et cetera, that we tend to attack at weak points, such as access points.
08:37But the reality is that it can be dug out pretty quickly if the internals survive military strikes.
08:45And frankly, I have to say that while the 2025 bombings of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan
08:55did clearly, you know, physical damage to the nuclear sites,
09:01it's not so clear that the war since February of this year has accomplished very much on the nuclear side.
09:11I want to go to what was a part of your remit when you were the Secretary of Energy,
09:14and that is domestic oil and gas prices.
09:16And this is a week in which we saw diesel climb above $6 a gallon.
09:19I think we have here something all TV journalists like to show,
09:22which is signage indicating a high price of gas, high price of diesel in this case,
09:26$9.99 a gallon out in California.
09:29But that's literally the highest they can go on those signs.
09:32On those signs, yes.
09:32Because there are only three digits available.
09:34You know, we're kind of looking to policymakers here to do something,
09:38we broadly, Americans, as these prices get higher and higher.
09:41Were you in your position today?
09:43What is there that the U.S. government can do to bring these prices down
09:46as we look at kind of the broader ramifications of having this refinery crisis around the world?
09:51Yeah.
09:52Well, first of all, on the remit, I think it is worth reemphasizing that
09:56the Secretary of Energy does have the remit on these energy issues,
10:00but also clearly has the nuclear portfolio, which is why we were so engaged,
10:05of course, with Iran in the first place.
10:08Now, on the energy side, I think it's a very important point to bring home
10:14that the shortage of crude oil being created in the Gulf area
10:20with the Houthis and the Iranians, Hormuz and the Bab el-Mendeb Strait in the Red Sea,
10:27is certainly affecting crude oil availability,
10:33and that's been somewhat cancelled out through a variety of means.
10:43However, and there's much more to say on that,
10:45however, switching over to refined products like diesel,
10:50frankly, the shortage is much more acute here,
10:54and that's partly because of the refineries being shut out, of course,
10:58in the Gulf region, but also elsewhere.
11:00For example, because of the Russia invasion of Ukraine,
11:05Russian refineries have been hit pretty hard.
11:09China has cut down on its exports of refined products,
11:14so that's why you see things like diesel prices and jet fuel prices going so high.
11:20But I don't want to provide only negative views,
11:25but nevertheless, I will add to that, that in the United States,
11:31the refineries in the United States have been running just flat out.
11:35They're probably like 98% of capacity,
11:39and that has helped fill the gap on refined products.
11:44However, historically, the refineries have major maintenance periods called turnarounds,
11:51including in the fall.
11:54A, when you're running a complex chemical facility like that so hard,
12:00you just have to do maintenance.
12:02And they typically do that, let's say, in the spring and the fall,
12:06when they are shifting the blend of fuels that they are preparing for summer and winter.
12:12So we have a big issue coming up where we're approaching the turnaround season,
12:20and we really can't afford to have refineries really cutting back on making those products.
12:27Now, in terms of your question, what can the Secretary of Energy do,
12:31or the administration in general, including the Secretary of Defense?
12:35Well, one issue is, and I believe this is happening,
12:39is conferring with the owners of those refinery systems in particular
12:46about what can be done to quickly increase the production of refined products.
12:53Can we expand capacity, for example?
12:57Can we extend some refineries past their normal maintenance season?
13:02How to manage the pace of how maintenance and shutdowns and expansions happen,
13:08I think, would be the main focus.
13:10Building a new refinery today is not practical for any reasonable time period.
Comments