Local officials, business leaders, job seekers, concerned citizens and people looking to learn about the nuclear industry packed an open house event in Paducah Wednesday hosted by Global Laser Enrichment.
GLE – the company developing a first-of-its-kind uranium enrichment facility just outside the western Kentucky city limits – has planned to build what will be known as Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility for more than a decade.
The long-gestating project to build the world’s first facility employing laser uranium enrichment at a commercial scale has rapidly gained momentum since the company struck a deal in 2024 to acquire land adjacent to the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a shuttered U.S. Department of Energy site that housed uranium enrichment operations for more than 50 years before closing in 2013. Since then, GLE formally announced its plans for the nearly $1.8 billion facility and announced that it had received nearly $99 million in incentives from state and local governments.
More than 200 people attended Wednesday’s event at downtown Paducah’s Walker Hall. Some were excited about the amount the company planned to invest in the region – which Gov. Andy Beshear previously called the largest single investment in western Kentucky’s history –, and the jobs the nuclear industry could create. However, others expressed concerns about a perceived lack of transparency from the company and worries about the facility's safety.
Kameron Costello works at a company that monitors environmental pollution at sites like the former PGDP site. He said he came to learn what GLE has planned.
“It is nice to see a big company come in doing what they're fixing to do, and pretty much allowing people to show up … and see what they're about,” he said. “There's a lot of things that we don't know, but [everyone’s] trying to get as much as information as [they] can and them allowing us to ask that, you know, that is a privilege that a lot of companies don't do.”
GLE has had a deal with the U.S. Department of Energy since 2016 to use its proprietary molecular process – which uses lasers to selectively vibrate uranium molecules and then physically separate inert ones – to enrich 200,000 metric tons of depleted uranium “tails” in storage at the PGDP site.
A handful of protestors stood outside the event, decrying the project as an environmental hazard. Among them was Mark Donham, an outspoken Paducah environmental advocate who previously chaired the DOE’s Paducah Citizen’s Advisory Board for six years.
Donham waited until toward the end of the event before venturing in to ask questions of his own to GLE employees. Ultimately, he said GLE’s event was “kind of a dollar short and a day late.”
“The concern has been that people feel like it's a done deal before anybody even has a chance to say anything about it, and it gives that feeling that it's a done deal,” he said. “That's what they're trying to portray in [there].”
Safety was on many attendees’ minds. Donham said he’s concerned about potential ongoing community health impacts from the project.
“The idea of building two uranium enrichment plants next to each other, right by a site that has been severely polluted by a uranium enrichment plant that the taxpayers have already paid billions of dollars to try to clean up, [when] some of the biggest problems are still out there, is just kind of crazy,” he said. “Other than using the laser … the rest of the process – which involves quite a bit of stuff – is going to be pretty much the same as was done before, and there's potentially a lot of issues with that.”
Donham also expressed his worries about the planned facility’s proximity to the New Madrid Seismic Zone, a major fault system that’s generated catastrophic earthquakes – most recently in the 19th century – and has the potential to create others in the future. Gaye Brewer said she’s also worried about the threat of a major event in a zone that just last week experienced its largest quake in four decades.
“My main concern is that they address seismic issues. Since this is a seismically active area, other than that, I think everything else can be engineered,” she said.
Brewer also praised GLE for hosting the meeting, and said she thinks other companies building nuclear developments, among other things, should do the same.
“Kudos to them for coming out and having meetings like this. I hope they have more,” she said. “I hope General Matter does. I hope whoever puts in the AI data center does so that people can come and find out more about what's actually going on out there. That's the big need in the community is information and communication.”
GLE CEO Steve Long was in attendance Wednesday, talking with local leaders and answering attendees’ questions. He said his company is working to be “very transparent” as work on the site progresses.
“We're not here for the 90% of folks who support nuclear and kind of want it. We're here for the 10% who have lots of questions and concerns,” Long said. “We wanted to give the community a chance to meet the people behind the work and have very open conversations about what we're working on [and] what they can expect as we try to bring this facility to reality.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted GLE’s licensing application last August and, in September, the company reported it had completed “a large-scale enrichment demonstration” at a North Carolina facility that proved its proprietary technique could work at commercial scale.
Earlier this year, GLE was awarded $28 million by the U.S. Department of Energy to boost domestic production of enriched uranium in the U.S. and also support cleanup efforts at the former PGDP site.
A draft Environmental Impact Statement – and a response from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – were released in recent months. With the call for public comment on the EIS closing on May 11, Long expects a final version to be issued late this summer before a final safety evaluation report is published later this year.
If all of those regulatory milestones are cleared, Long expects the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel to hold a hearing and grant GLE its license early next year. With all of this in the works, Long said GLE is still testing its laser uranium enrichment technology at a facility in Wilmington, North Carolina.
“We're actually processing kilogram quantities of uranium every day down there, and operating the same lasers that we're going to deploy at plant scale here. Having that test loop and being able to actually operate and work with uranium already today not only helps us to understand the challenges of the technology, but also to build experience with our operators and our safety team and all that so we're not doing it for the first time when we get here.”
GLE expects to begin enrichment operations in Paducah by 2030.
