Hundreds of millions of federal dollars will be heading to a company setting up shop in far western Kentucky to support private uranium enrichment efforts and continue the Trump administration’s push toward the advancement of nuclear energy.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced on Monday that it was awarding a total of $2.7 billion to three companies with the aim of expanding the capacity for domestic uranium enrichment.
A third of those funds were awarded to General Matter – the California-based company building a uranium enrichment facility on the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant site in western Kentucky – to “create domestic HALEU enrichment capacity.”
While nearly all currently operational nuclear power facilities in the country run off what’s called LEU (Low-Enriched Uranium), HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium) is needed to fuel the next generation of reactors – like the small modular reactor being constructed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
In an interview Wednesday, CEO Scott Nolan said the $900 million task order will speed things up for General Matter, with the money going towards construction and startup costs for the facility that broke ground in August. He said this federal funding will accelerate the company’s production scale by years.
“We will be online before 2030. It does accelerate our timeline. I think what it does even more … is it helps us build even bigger capacity,” Nolan said. “This award is really going to help us build at a larger scale more quickly, and pull in our ability to satisfy all domestic demand years earlier than without it.”
The DOE awarded equal amounts to American Centrifuge Operating to create domestic HALEU production capacity and to Orano Federal Services to expand the country’s domestic LEU enrichment capacity.
Nolan said that, right now, there isn’t a commercial scale supply chain for HALEU in the United States. The DOE celebrated the production of nearly a metric ton of the nuclear fuel by Centrus Energy Corp in Ohio last summer, a first of its kind achievement for the country’s nuclear economy.
America’s reliance on imported uranium has increased steadily since the 1980s. 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.
Nolan hopes his company can help end that reliance, especially for HALEU.
“The U.S. was once the world leader in enrichment, and a lot of that enrichment happened here in Paducah, Kentucky. And we're building in Paducah, Kentucky, for that exact reason: to bring it back to where it was most recently done.”
General Matter has remained quiet on how exactly the company plans to enrich the fuel to satisfy its indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for HALEU with the DOE. Nolan said he hopes to shed more light on their enrichment method later this year.
Nolan thinks General Matter will be capable of satisfying “all domestic demand” for HALEU out of its Paducah facility by the early 2030s. He said he wants to equip the companies and utilities building reactors with the fuel they need to meet benchmarks to quadruple the amount of nuclear energy produced in the country by 2050, part of a federal effort to produce more clean energy in the U.S.
“We want to make sure that they have what they need to prove what they can do, and to bring about the future of nuclear energy in this country, to make it not just the safest form of base load – not just the cleanest, lowest carbon form of base load but also the cheapest form of base load,” Nolan said.
General Matter plans to release specific timelines later this year.
Global Laser Enrichment
As a part of Monday’s announcement, the DOE also awarded Global Laser Enrichment $28 million to “continue advancing next generation uranium enrichment technology for the nuclear fuel cycle.”
GLE is developing the first commercial laser uranium enrichment plant in the world, with plans to build just down the road from the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant and utilize depleted nuclear tails from the former DOE facility.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted GLE’s licensing application in 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.
