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General Matter to make high-assay low-enriched uranium

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HALEU is uranium enriched to between 5% and 20%

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Company's goal is to halve the cost of HALEU enrichment

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Former SpaceX engineer

Scott Nolan, CEO of startup General Matter, is on a mission to

help end Russia's monopoly on a type of more-enriched nuclear

fuel by producing it at commercial scale in the United States

and slashing its costs.

Nolan incorporated San Francisco-based General Matter this

year in order to make high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU,

for a variety of planned atomic plants including small modular

reactors, or SMRs, that backers hope will take off in the

2030s.

HALEU is uranium enriched to between 5% and 20%, which

backers say has the potential to make new high-tech reactors

more efficient. Uranium fuel used in today's reactors is

enriched to about 5%. Big Tech companies such as Amazon ( AMZN )

have plans to build new reactors to serve power-hungry data

centers.

"We believe HALEU is the most urgent need in the market

today, and the most sensitive to enrichment cost," Nolan told

Reuters in his first media interview since forming the company.

"We are focused not only on bringing back domestic capacity,

but on bringing the cost down significantly," Nolan said.

The goal of General Matters is to halve the cost of HALEU

enrichment, long term, Nolan said. HALEU is made primarily in

Russia, and its price is elusive. Estimates range from $25,000

to $35,000 per kilogram of 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 - part of an initiative to

kick start domestic production. The United States plans to award

$2.7 billion in contracts for HALEU, subject to Congress in

coming years, the department said.

General Matters, which currently has no infrastructure to

make uranium fuel, will face stiff competition from other

companies with experience and facilities in the uranium

industry.

The other companies with 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 ( LEU ) subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating.

Critics of the use of HALEU have said that the level of its

enrichment means it is a weapons risk, and they recommend

limiting its enrichment to 10% to 12%. Nolan said his company

will look to regulators to determine the level.

Nolan is also a partner in Founders Fund, a venture capital

fund that was the first institutional investor in SpaceX and

that Peter Thiel, a prominent supporter of President-elect

Donald Trump, helped launch.

Nolan said he expects that nuclear energy "should and will

be" an important part of Trump's efforts to expand sources of

baseload electricity.

SPACEX EXPERIENCE

Nolan worked at Elon Musk's private aerospace company SpaceX

from 2003 to 2007. Nolan said his company's planned HALEU

production will share SpaceX's focus on developing new

technology and cutting costs.

"SpaceX combined people from Silicon Valley in the software

startup industry with the aerospace industry, and converged

these two skill sets," Nolan said.

"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," Nolan said.

A General Matters spokesperson said Nolan has not been in

contact with Musk since "well before" the idea of the company

was conceived in 2023.

Nolan did not reveal what kind of technology General Matter

plans to use to produce HALEU. Uranium production is dominated

by centrifuges that spin at high speeds. Some new players are

also trying to use lasers to produce uranium fuel.

"Some are more commercially proven. Some are still to be

proven from a technology standpoint that they can scale," Nolan

said.