President Donald Trump formally transmitted a proposed 30-year civil nuclear energy pact with Saudi Arabia to Congress on Monday, tying its implementation to the kingdom’s recognition of Israel.
The agreement, which would allow U.S. firms to export civilian nuclear technology to Riyadh, was submitted to Capitol Hill on August 24 and is now subject to a 90-session-day congressional review period. Unless Congress objects within that window, the deal will take effect automatically. A U.S. administration official confirmed the submission on August 25, noting that Trump’s position remains unchanged: the pact will only advance if Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered normalization agreements with Israel.
The proposed accord calls for the construction of AP1000 reactors, a project estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars. Westinghouse, the reactor supplier, is jointly owned by Canada’s Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management. The agreement was reached in July, shortly after Trump set normalization with Israel as a prerequisite for its activation.
Saudi Arabia has long demanded an irreversible path to a Palestinian state as a condition for recognizing Israel, a stance that contrasts with the normalization deals brokered under the 2020 Abraham Accords. Those agreements, reached with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, marked a shift in regional diplomacy but did not include Saudi participation.
Critics, including some Democratic lawmakers and nonproliferation advocates, argue the pact lacks sufficient safeguards against uranium enrichment or nuclear waste reprocessing—pathways that could enable weapons development. Henry Sokolski, head of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, described the terms as inadequate for a country seeking to avoid enrichment while pursuing normalization. The Trump administration maintains the deal complies with legal nonproliferation requirements.
If Congress were to reject the agreement, Trump could veto the decision, requiring a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override. The pact’s transmission to congressional committees is expected Wednesday, August 26.
The move comes amid broader regional tensions following the October 2023 escalation in Gaza, which disrupted earlier diplomatic efforts toward Saudi-Israel normalization. The UAE’s 2009 civil nuclear deal with Washington, often cited as a model, included strict nonproliferation measures known as the "gold standard."
