The Secretary of Energy shall, within ninety days after March 10, 1978, establish orderly and expeditious procedures, including provision for necessary administrative actions and inter-agency memoranda of understanding, which are mutually agreeable to the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Commerce and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the consideration of requests for subsequent arrangements under this section. Such procedures shall include, at a minimum, explicit direction on the handling of such requests, express deadlines for the solicitation and collection of the views of the consulted agencies (with identified officials responsible for meeting such deadlines), an inter-agency coordinating authority to monitor the processing of such requests, predetermined procedures for the expeditious handling of intra-agency and inter-agency disagreements and appeals to higher authorities, frequent meetings of inter-agency administrative coordinators to review the status of all pending requests, and similar administrative mechanisms. To the extent practicable, an applicant should be advised of all the information required of the applicant for the entire process for every agency’s needs at the beginning of the process. Potentially controversial requests should be identified as quickly as possible so that any required policy decisions or diplomatic consultations can be initiated in a timely manner. An immediate effort should be undertaken to establish quickly any necessary standards and criteria, including the nature of any required assurance or evidentiary showings, for the decisions required under this section. Further, such procedures shall specify that if he intends to prepare a Nuclear Proliferation Assessment Statement, the Secretary of State shall so declare in his response to the Department of Energy. If the Secretary of State declares that he intends to prepare such a Statement, he shall do so within sixty days of his receipt of a copy of the proposed subsequent arrangement (during which time the Secretary of Energy may not enter into the subsequent arrangement), unless pursuant to the Secretary of State’s request, the President waives the sixty-day requirement and notifies the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate of such waiver and the justification therefor. The processing of any subsequent arrangement proposed and filed as of March 10, 1978, shall not be delayed pending the development and establishment of procedures to implement the requirements of this section.
Nothing in this section is intended to prohibit, permanently or unconditionally, the reprocessing of spent fuel owned by a foreign nation which fuel has been supplied by the United States, to preclude the United States from full participation in the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation provided for in section 3224 of title 22; to in any way limit the presentation or consideration in that evaluation of any nuclear fuel cycle by the United States or any other participation; nor to prejudice open and objective consideration of the results of the evaluation.
Notwithstanding section 7172(d) of this title, the Secretary of Energy, and not the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, shall have sole jurisdiction within the Department of Energy over any matter arising from any function of the Secretary of Energy in this section.