A lease to build the first U.S.-owned, privately developed uranium enrichment facility in the country was signed in western Kentucky on Tuesday against a backdrop of containers holding depleted tails of uranium hexafluoride – some covered in rust.
General Matter, the California-based company with ties to billionaire and Trump ally Peter Thiel, plans to build a proposed $1.5 billion facility on the 100-acre parcel leased from the U.S. Department of Energy on the site of the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in McCracken County. That site, shuttered in 2013, was built by the federal government in the 1950s to boost national defense efforts – and later generated fuel for nuclear power plants.
Attendees bussed to the site Tuesday morning heard from General Matter CEO Scott Nolan, DOE officials, as well as a bipartisan group of politicians including Gov. Andy Beshear, U.S. sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul and Congressman Jamie Comer.
Nolan said his company hopes to end America’s reliance on imported uranium, which has been steadily increasing since the 1980s. The CEO said Paducah’s legacy in the energy industry and the site itself sold them on western Kentucky.
“We're going to reverse that. We're going to start a rebirth of enrichment in the U.S., here in Paducah, here on this land behind us,” Nolan said.
Beshear said the “massive undertaking” represents the biggest development in the history of the western part of the state. The governor also said it marks the start of a new chapter in the Bluegrass state’s leadership when it comes to energy, bringing the DOE site “back to life.”
“This is the story of Kentucky, the energy produced from our lands and from the sweat of our hardworking people helped grow our nation into a global economic powerhouse and, today, our new Kentucky home stands ready to help more,” Beshear said.
Members of Kentucky’s congressional delegation also highlighted the event’s importance, with Comer saying it’s the first time he can remember having both U.S. senators, himself and the governor all in the same spot to celebrate something like this. The congressman also stressed the importance of developing a nuclear power to add to the country’s baseload.
“We've got a Department of Energy now that's focused on a new energy economy, a practical, common sense energy economy that is an all-of-the-above portfolio. We support wind and solar. We support, obviously, electric, but we've got to have more,” Comer said. “You can't have economic development without energy.”
He also noted that he thought the region had the capacity to be a leader in the energy industry, as it was when the PGDP first fired up in the 1950s.
“I believe with all my heart that west Kentucky is going to be the energy capital of this new energy economy, and today is the first step,” Comer said.
McConnell – who advocated for the PGDP site to become one of four selected by the DOE for a potential artificial intelligence data center and energy project – said Tuesday’s groundbreaking was “about the future” and cited nuclear energy as a solution to reduce carbon emissions.
“That's why we're here, and sooner or later, I think America will understand that domestic use of nuclear energy is the way forward,” McConnell said. “If we are indeed concerned about climate issues, this is the obvious solution.”
Roger A. Jarrell II, the acting assistant secretary of the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, called General Matter’s proposed project transformative and underlined its potential to “unleash commercial nuclear” and save taxpayers money.
“We're unlocking private investment and fast tracking commercial licensing activities, which will allow America to reassert expertise to lead the world in nuclear energy and achieve a true nuclear energy renaissance,” said Jarrell.
President Donald Trump, who appointed Jarrell, has signed a series of executive orders in recent months aimed at accelerating nuclear energy developments across the country. Nolan was in the Oval Office for that signing – he said at the request of the White House – though the company has yet to enrich uranium, according to Drew DeWalt, one of General Matter’s cofounders.
From the podium, Jarrell said that General Matter employees were “laying out their concept” to the DOE official just four months ago.
Jarrell said he expects General Matter’s enrichment of depleted uranium hexafluoride to save taxpayers around $800 million in disposal costs. The company’s lease, according to a DOE release, entitles them to “a minimum of 7,600 cylinders” of the spent fuel sitting at the former PGDP site.
Nolan, in an interview later Tuesday, said that those cylinders won’t be his company’s primary supply. He said they’ll be “a supplement,” if necessary, to feedstock supplied by other providers in the nuclear fuel cycle industry like ConverDyn, a uranium supplier based across the river from Paducah at the Honeywell Uranium Hexafluoride Processing Facility in Metropolis, Illinois, and others.
General Matter plans to pursue Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing for enrichment, though the CEO declined to comment on the enrichment method General Matter plans to use. Nolan said his company plans to begin “mass-manufacturing” hardware and doing construction on the site in 2026.
“The goal is absolutely this decade, and as soon as we can. So we're going to be moving as quickly as we can. You know, obviously, with quality and safety in mind as the primary things,” he said. “But we think that these things are not at odds. You can move quickly and have extremely high quality [and] extremely high safety, and that's our goal.”
Though Nolan stated his goal is to enrich uranium before 2030, the DOE release regarding the project said that enrichment operations are planned to begin in 2034.
Local officials, including Greater Paducah Economic Development President/CEO Bruce Wilcox, McCracken County Judge-Executive Craig Clymer and Paducah Mayor George Bray, made remarks at a separate event held on the lawn of the National Quilt Museum in downtown Paducah later Tuesday.
Wilcox said the company and local officials have had a shared goal since talks began.
“We had a vision of American energy independence, a vision where uranium enrichment and clean nuclear energy power was leading the way and, selfishly, a vision where Paducah was at the heart or at the center of all of it,” he said. “Together, we're bringing that vision to life.”
The local economic development official said he expects General Matter’s project to produce a recurring annual economic impact of $71 million per year in McCracken County.
Clymer was on much the same page.
“The mission is commercial: to supply enriched uranium for a clean, carbon-free energy future,” the judge-executive said. “This isn't just about refurbishing and restarting an old engine. This is about building something bigger.”
