(Bloomberg) — National Security Council officials have briefed members of Congress on a long-sought nuclear technology-sharing deal with Saudi Arabia that would allow U.S. companies to build reactors in the kingdom, lawmakers said.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee received a classified briefing on Tuesday on the contours of the deal, Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the panel, said in an interview.

A senior US official said last month that the deal had been completed in principle after years of negotiations. Although the Westinghouse Electric Co. and other U.S. nuclear companies, it has alarmed nonproliferation experts and some members of Congress who worry that the Saudis could enrich the uranium used into weapons material.

“I fear that Saudi Arabia – a country with a terrible human rights record – cannot be trusted to use its civilian nuclear energy program solely for peaceful purposes and will instead enrich uranium and attempt nuclear weapons to develop,” said Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. , wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden last month.

Previous nuclear technology sharing agreements with countries such as Japan have explicitly banned the enrichment and reprocessing of spent uranium. The senior US official said the Saudi deal includes non-proliferation elements and was drafted with input from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy and State Department. A spokesperson for the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.

Once an agreement is reached, Congress will have 90 days to pass a veto-proof law rejecting the agreement or adding conditions to it before the measure automatically takes effect, said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.

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