BIS Amends Export Controls to Reflect Nuclear Supplier Group Changes
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued a final rule, mostly effective Aug. 7, to implement licensing changes for nuclear products in the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). The final rule removes the license requirements for certain items controlled for nonproliferation reasons in order to comply with the results of a number of Nuclear Suppliers Group plenary summits since 2005. The final rule also adds Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico and Serbia as parties to the NSG.
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The final rule removes some nonproliferation license requirements for NSG countries, with the exception of China. NSG countries agreed at a plenary in 2005 to put into place additional measures to determine if a country that is receiving an export has sufficient export controls in place to prevent transfer or diversion to a proliferation threat. The final rule amends the EAR's nuclear end-user/end-use licensing review standards to reflect those 2005 changes. The final rule also adds language that explicitly identifies control guidelines on certain 5-axis machine tools for grinding and milling, but does not actually expand the scope of controls.
In order to reflect changes made at a 2012 NSG meeting, this final rules amends the EAR to control filament winding machines that are specifically capable of “winding cylindrical tubes with an internal diameter between 75 mm and 650 mm and lengths of 300 mm or greater.” The final rules amends the EAR to clarify it controls lithium isotope separation equipment based on the lithium-mercury amalgam process, among a host of other changes made in 2012. To reflect NSG changes made at a plenary in 2013, BIS is also revising the EAR to control “hydrogen-cryogenic distillation columns with an internal diameter of 30 cm or greater and ‘effective lengths’ of 4 m or greater,” along with several other changes brokered at the 2013 summit.
BIS is permitting items that this rule removes from export or reexport eligibility that are “on dock for loading, on lighter, laden aboard an exporting carrier, or en route aboard a carrier to a port of export” to proceed to the original destination as long as the items are shipped before Sept. 22. Deemed technology and source code exports that are removed from eligibility are allowed to proceed to the original destination under previously authorized license exceptions or without a license until Nov. 4.
(Federal Register 08/07/14)