Scott Nolan worked at SpaceX engineer before he became the CEO of a startup named General Matter. He is on a mission to help end Russia’s monopoly on a special type of more-enriched nuclear fuel for advance nuclear fission reactors by producing it at commercial scale in the United States and slashing its costs.
     Nolan incorporated San Francisco-based General Matter this year for the purpose of producing high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, for a variety of planned nuclear power reactors including small modular reactors, or SMRs, that backers hope will take off in the 2030s.
     HALEU is uranium enriched to between five percent and twenty percent, which backers say has the potential to make new high-tech reactors more efficient. The uranium fuel used in current nuclear power reactors is enriched to about five percent. Big Tech companies such as Amazon have plans to construct new reactors to serve power-hungry data centers.
     Nolan told an interviewer in his first media interview since forming the company that “We believe HALEU is the most urgent need in the market today, and the most sensitive to enrichment cost. We are focused not only on bringing back domestic capacity, but on bringing the cost down significantly.”
    The long-term goal of General Matters is to cut the cost of HALEU enrichment in half according to Nolan. Today, HALEU is made primarily in Russia, and its price is volatile. Current estimates range from twenty-five thousand dollars to thirty-five thousand dollars per kilogram of enriched uranium.
     The U.S. Department of Energy in October awarded initial contracts to four companies including General Matters seeking to produce HALEU in the United States. This is part of an initiative to kick start domestic production. The U.S. plans to award two billion seven hundred million dollars in contracts for HALEU production, subject to approval of Congress in coming years.
     General Matter currently has no infrastructure to make uranium fuel. It will face stiff competition from other companies who do have experience and facilities in the uranium industry.
    The other companies receiving U.S. support are: Urenco USA, a European firm with operations in New Mexico; Orano USA, based in Maryland with global headquarters in France; and Centrus Energy’s subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating.
     Critics of the use of HALEU have claimed that the level of its enrichment means it is a nuclear weapons proliferation risk, and they recommend limiting its enrichment to ten to twelve percent. Nolan said his company will look to regulators to determine the level of desired enrichment.
     Nolan said he hopes that nuclear fission energy production “should and will be” an important part of Trump’s efforts to expand sources of baseload electricity.
     Nolan worked at SpaceX from 2003 to 2007. He added that his company’s planned HALEU production will share SpaceX’s focus on developing new technology and cutting costs.
     Nolan said that “SpaceX combined people from Silicon Valley in the software startup industry with the aerospace industry, and converged these two skill sets. We’re doing something similar, where we have deep experience on the team from the fuel cycle in the nuclear space, and are combining it with experience from the technology industry to rethink the problem and come at it from a new direction.”

General Matter