By Kennedy Maize
The U.S. Department of Energy has signed a deal with a mysterious startup company with no track record, directed by ultraright billionaire techbro Peter Thiel, to lease 100 acres of the agency’s mammoth (3,556 acres), elderly, and moribund uranium enrichment plant near Paducah, K.Y. for undisclosed terms.
The new lessee is San Francisco-based General Matter, a 2024 startup that says it plans to resume enriching uranium at Paducah by 2030, although the company refuses to publicly say what enrichment technology it intends to employ. DOE has not yet responded to The Quad Report’s requests for financial or operational details other than a news release on Aug. 5.
The only significant detail in the news release is that DOE “provides General Matter with a minimum of 7,600 cylinders of existing uranium hexafluoride to supply fuel for future reenrichment operations. Reprocessing of uranium hexafluoride saves the American taxpayer about $800 million in avoided disposal costs. And General Matter benefits from a consistent supply of U.S.-origin uranium hexafluoride feed suitable for reenrichment.”
A news release from Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear the same day claims that the project will “include a nearly $1.5 billion investment and create 140 well-paying jobs ,” although the source for those figures is unidentified.
In an appearance on Fox News, General Matter official Lee Robinson, a company founder, said the project would be the first “privately-owned, privately-operated uranium enrichment facility.” That is incorrect.
DOE and its Atomic Energy Commission predecessor operated the plant from 1952 until 1993, when it partially privatized the operation. DOE leased Paducah in 1998 to privately-owned United States Enrichment Corp., based in Bethesda, Md., until enrichment ceased in 2013 , leaving DOE with the radioactive remnants. USEC eventually became Centrus Energy Corp. and took over a failed DOE centrifuge enrichment project in Piketon, Ohio.
UK-based multinational enrichment firm Urenco, through its Louisiana Energy Services, operates a commercial facility in Eunice, N.M., using gas centrifuge technology. It has been enriching uranium since 2010 and is regulated by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
In his Fox News appearance, Robinson said of the General Matter project, “This is enrichment for commercial power, for the 94 reactors that provide 20% of the grid right now…. We are going to produce low-enriched uranium which goes directly into those 94 reactors.”
General Matter also has DOE approval to produce HALEU (high assay, low-enriched uranium) for the government, as do Centrus, Urenco, and France’s Orano. Selection of General Matter was a surprise. Few had heard of the company as it went into business in 2024 with the aim of getting into uranium enrichment.
Scott Nolan, a veteran of Elon Musk’s Space X, and a member of Thiel’s MAGA-friendly venture capital firm Founders Fund, started the company and is CEO. According to a recent article in The Economist, Thiel, creator of both Pay Pall and Palantir, has become disillusioned with “bits” and enamored of “atoms.”
Thiel became the chief investor in General Matter and led a funding round that yielded $50 million in startup funds. Unlike many other of his investments, Thiel became so enthusiastic about uranium enrichment that he decided to sit on the board of directors.
General Matter continues to be secretive. It’s website is a Potemkin Village, all façade and not much behind it.
The company appears to have only three employees. Nolan is the CEO. Robinson, who appeared on the Fox News segment, previously led energy investments for the Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit. The third is Ashby Bridges, a nuclear expert. He was a key official at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining General Matter. He also has experience at Urenco USA. He’s been the company’s contact with the NRC.
Many key elements of the deal remain to be unveiled, chief among them the enrichment technology.
Paducah was built to use gaseous diffusion enrichment, which pushes hexafluoride through microporous membranes to separate out the heavier and scarce U238 from the much more prevalent U235. It’s a slow and expensive technology. Whether General Matter could use gaseous diffusion depends on if any of the original enrichment cascades at Paducah remain. DOE has been demolishing Paducah for years. The 100-acre lease may be located on a site of remaining cascades, if there are any.
The current enrichment technology uses gas centrifuges to spin the hexafluoride at very high speeds, again separating the uranium isotopes by weight. That’s how Urenco’s New Mexico plant produces low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel. It’s how Iran has been creating highly-enriched uranium for its secretive weapons program.
A third technology, atomic laser isotope separation, which tunes lasers to separate the uranium isotopes has generated interest. It has technical promise, but no commercial applications exist.
The DOE lease has generated considerable skepticism. Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear chemist at Los Alamos and proprietor of the Nuclear Diner website, wrote, “It may be just me, but I would be very careful of a company that has never done such things and doesn’t say how it plans to enrich uranium.”
Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist who heads the nuclear safety program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, commented in an email to The Quad Report, that “when General Matter appeared on the scene without disclosing the technology it was pursuing everyone thought it must be some new variant of laser enrichment. But the whole Paducah deal makes zero sense. Are they going to refurbish the old, contaminated, inefficient gaseous diffusion plant instead? And to enrich tails, for heaven’s sake? And all for a couple of years’ worth of LEU for the U.S. fleet?”
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