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Things are happening, and are going to happen in even more spectacular way.
President Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran, a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer.
Yes, you can do in the real life dungeon crawl from fantasy fiction and gaming, first time since Vietnam tunnel warfare. Yes it would be awesome.(to monitor from far away now, ofc.)
Of course it is disinfo, of course the real boots on the grounds will arrive somewhere else in completely unexpected place. No way would Commander-in-Chief announce his plans to the enemy in the open. This couldn't happen.
As someone who was very against the starting this war and still wishes it never happened. This seems like a good idea to get some benefit. Boots on the ground seizing the Uranium and physically destroying the enrichment facilities would actually provide some benefit to the war and make Iran think twice about re-starting their nuclear program.
I will grant you that the US military has been extremely competent on an operational level so far, but this seems a mission straight from hell.
Iranian enrichment facilities are deep underground. You will not capture them with working elevators. Expect to dig through tens of meters of rubble (if you are lucky) or concrete (if you are not). Of course, the WSJ piece is overly optimistic when it expects that the UF6 will still be in cylinders by the time you get there. At the very least, I would expect it to be blown all over the place. Though I would actually expect the regime to find a a few hundred tons of a cheap substance to mix it in. Obviously not D-UF6, as that would undo the enrichment work, but something which is easily separable within a month or so. I imagine even mixing it with sand would be annoying, perhaps requiring you to heat 100 tons of sand to get it to sublime. Though I am sure that the Iranians have found something nastier. Plus whatever traps you can imagine.
The people on the surface defending the site will not have a better time than your engineers. I mean, obviously you could turn anything within artillery range into Gaza and kill another 50k civilians in the process, but then you might as well nuke their site and call it a day. To interdict infantry from getting into range you would need a continuous bombardment of a sort which would make WW1's Western Front like a skirmish (though admittedly in a much smaller area). For a week or however long your engineers need.
And your excavators can't exactly hide underground, so you need a plan to protect them from every single drone, shell or rocket Iran might try to hit them with.
Nor is it very feasible to just bring your own depleted uranium to undo their enrichment process and leaving it on site. The problem here is that of half the separation work is going from 0.7% to 2% or so. So to undo most of the separation work of 400kg 60% U-235, you would need to ship in 24 tons of depleted uranium in the same chemical form, then mix it really well.
This shows the larger problem: even if it is feasible to airlift HEU out, what are you going to do about the 10% enriched uranium? This already has 85% of the separation work required for 60% HEU in it, but it is also 6 times less portable. Iran could trivially undo the last 15% of separation work and leave you having to scrape up 2.4 tons instead of 400kg.
Only if you can do so without paying too high a price. If you end up with Iran killing 100 soldiers and capturing another 20 while also spending a couple of dozen billions, Iran might decide that you are welcome back any time.
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