Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with a team of technical experts at a national laboratory in Tennessee on Thursday, a US official said, as the US works toward nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The visit to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, first reported by Axios, comes amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations with Tehran aimed, in large part, at constraining Iran’s nuclear program.
Scott Roecker, the vice president for the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Nuclear Materials Security Program, explained that the lab has a history of removing highly enriched uranium around the world.
It has both the expertise and the capabilities, in the form of a Mobile Uranium Facility, to safely handle, convert, and ship the highly enriched uranium, Roecker told CNN. However, he noted that nobody in the US has experience in retrieving buried stockpiles of uranium.
The June 2025 US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, what the Pentagon termed Operation Midnight Hammer, were assessed by US intelligence to have buried much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile at the Isfahan nuclear complex, but didn’t destroy it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this week that negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program would be “highly technical” and could 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 said. “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 top US diplomat said such a phase would be predicated on Iran re-opening the Strait of Hormuz.