US uranium enrichment startup emerges from stealth

Wednesday, 23 April 2025

General Matter was one of four companies selected in October 2024 by the US Department of Energy to provide enrichment services to help establish a US supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). According to information available at the time, the company had been registered in California earlier in the year, with Scott Nolan named as its CEO. Nolan, a former SpaceX employee, is a partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund which was co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

On 14 April, the company announced itself on social media. "For the past year, General Matter has been incubated within Founders Fund, with a team from SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, national labs, and the DOD. We are undertaking an engineering challenge which, if successful, will fundamentally improve the trajectory of our nation," it said on X.

"I spent over a year at Founders Fund searching for an American enrichment company to invest in, only to find there wasn’t one. So we built our own. General Matter is filling the US nuclear fuel gap. We are enriching uranium in America, and we will be shipping by the end of the decade," Nolan said.

The same day, Bloomberg reported that Thiel is joining the board of General Matter. According to the report, the company has "built up a small operation in Los Angeles of roughly two dozen engineers, nuclear scientists and safety experts, pulling staff from national labs and the private sector".

It has not provided details of its process for enriching uranium, but on 2 December Nolan submitted a Letter of Intent to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in anticipation of a "forthcoming application for the necessary licences to support the production and handling of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU)".

"General Matter has been awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract by the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) under Solicitation No. 89243223RNE000031," that letter notes. "This award specifically supports the DOE-NE’s strategic objectives of securing a domestic supply chain of HALEU to support the continued development of advanced reactors and to strengthen US leadership in nuclear technology. As a DOE-NE HALEU IDIQ awardee, General Matter’s anticipated scope of responsibility under future task orders includes the enrichment, storage, and transportation of HALEU. These operations are critical to meeting the growing demand for enriched uranium necessary to support both domestic and international markets, with an emphasis on maintaining safety and security standards."

HALEU contains between 5% and 19.75% of fissile uranium-235 and will be required to meet the fuel needs of many of the advanced reactor designs that are currently being developed.

Information submitted to the NRC alongside the Letter of Intent is classed as "proprietary and confidential", with the company saying: "Years of cumulative effort have gone into the work supporting this content, and given the innovative and differentiated insights generated by the work, others would need to expend great effort to duplicate the information. This information cannot be acquired elsewhere."