Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with a workforce of technical specialists at a nationwide laboratory in Tennessee on Thursday, a US official mentioned, because the US works towards nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The go to to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, first reported by Axios, comes amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations with Tehran aimed, in massive half, at constraining Iran’s nuclear program.
Scott Roecker, the vp for the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Nuclear Materials Security Program, defined that the lab has a historical past of eradicating extremely enriched uranium world wide.
It has each the experience and the capabilities, in the shape of a Mobile Uranium Facility, to securely deal with, convert, and ship the extremely enriched uranium, Roecker advised NCS. However, he famous that no person in the US has expertise in retrieving buried stockpiles of uranium.
The June 2025 US strikes on Iran’s nuclear amenities, what the Pentagon termed Operation Midnight Hammer, had been assessed by US intelligence to have buried a lot of Iran’s extremely enriched uranium stockpile on the Isfahan nuclear complicated, however didn’t destroy it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio mentioned earlier this week that negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program could be “highly technical” and will take months.
“Phase two is they have to commit to very specific negotiations on highly enriched, the disposition of the highly enriched uranium that still is buried deep in a mountain somewhere,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday. “They have to agree on negotiating severe and long-term limitations, and/or cancelation of enrichment activity in their country.”
“Obviously, these are highly technical matters, so I don’t think you could work those out in five days,” Rubio mentioned. “That would require a team of experts to meet over a 30, 60, 90-day period and work out the details, but they have to commit to their willingness to do that.”
The prime US diplomat mentioned such a section could be predicated on Iran re-opening the Strait of Hormuz.