Another week, another nuclear industry announcement with implications for western Kentucky.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced on social media Thursday that it had accepted General Matter’s application for the company’s planned $1.5 billion uranium enrichment facility on the grounds of the U.S. Department of Energy site in McCracken County that housed the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
The California-based company – which has ties to billionaire investor Peter Thiel, an ally of President Donald Trump – announced the project last year. General Matter officially signed its lease for the 100-acre parcel of land on the DOE site last August before holding a groundbreaking ceremony.
Before it went offline in 2013, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was one of the few places in the U.S. enriching nuclear fuel at a commercial scale. It was built and brought online, initially, in the 1950s to enrich uranium for defense purposes before shifting its production to fuel for nuclear power plants.
General Matter CEO Scott Nolan has said several times since the launch of the project – which the company has called the first enrichment operation in the U.S. to be privately funded – that Paducah’s history with the industry is what brought their nuclear fuel startup to western Kentucky.
“This [facility] will bring jobs back to this DOE site,” Nolan said Thursday at an event on the federally owned property. “This was the year of site preparation, next year is the year of construction, 2028 is the year of installation and commissioning and then 2029 is when this site will be fully operational.”
Greater Paducah Economic Development CEO and president Bruce Wilcox hailed the project as an important one for his city.
“We're looking forward to working with General Matter to have them to be one of the largest, if not the largest, employer in Paducah-McCracken County,” Wilcox said.
Nolan – a former SpaceX employee who wants to bring the tech industry mindset to the world of nuclear power – talked up the importance of General Matter’s project in terms of the Trump administration’s goals to achieve more energy independence and equip the companies and utilities building reactors with the fuel they need to meet those benchmarks. Trump signed an executive order last year establishing a goal of quadrupling the amount of nuclear energy produced in the country by 2050.
“Here, we will take the U.S. from less than 1% of global [uranium] enrichment to [bringing] enrichment back domestically, not just at some scale, but at a scale that can displace adversarial enrichment from our imports and help get the U.S. on a path to self-sufficiency, both for us and then even supporting our allies,” Nolan added.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy Tim Walsh said Trump’s efforts to accelerate the nuclear industry in the U.S. – which in decades past was the global leader when it came to enriching uranium – will pay dividends for the country’s energy security and its rapidly developing, electricity-hungry artificial intelligence sector.
“Under President Trump's administration, we are all in on a nuclear renaissance,” he said at Thursday’s event. “We are fueling the future with nuclear power, but we can't have nuclear power if we don't have enriched uranium.”
An NRC license will enable General Matter to produce low-enriched uranium (LEU), which can be used at nuclear power plants. The company also plans to submit an amendment to its license to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) – a more concentrated grade of nuclear fuel – next year. The company received a $900 million task order from the DOE in January to create domestic HALEU production capacity.
Nolan noted that the NRC formally accepted General Matter’s application in “roughly half the normal amount of time,” with its initial submission made in September per the company’s Substack. General Matter also filed its environmental report for the project last month. In its acceptance letter, the federal regulator said the swiftness of the approval was a result of its “quality and completeness.”
Though the NRC has published some portions of the more than 1,000-page application publicly, neither the company nor the regulator has disclosed what enrichment method General Matter plans to use at the Paducah site – which will neighbor a $100 billion data center being built by Brookfield and powered by a NextEra Energy natural gas power plant and share a fence line with a first-of-its-kind facility being developed by Global Laser Enrichment.
Nolan said General Matter plans to detail their “very innovative” enrichment technology to the public next year, saying the company developed their proprietary method from the ground up.
“We really said … ‘Can we start over? Can we do a clean sheet redesign? Can we look at costs to make the U.S. competitive again, so that we don't need to shut it down in the future?’” the CEO said Thursday. “We started from scratch, looking at all the progress that's been made over the last 50-plus years around compute, materials, semiconductors, everything … and designing a novel technology.”
The NRC licensing process typically takes around 18 months for a full technical review, with an estimated completion date for General Matter’s application set for April 2028.
