Scott Nolan learned to think big at SpaceX, where he was among the first 30 hires and worked on the Merlin engines that would eventually power reusable rockets. Now the aerospace engineer is applying that same ethos to a more terrestrial challenge: rebuilding America's capacity to produce enriched uranium at a moment when the fuel has become a matter of national security.
His startup, General Matter, landed a $900 million Department of Energy contract in January 2026 and filed its first Nuclear Regulatory Commission license application last month to build a commercial enrichment facility in Paducah, Kentucky. The company aims to supply high-assay low-enriched uranium, fuel for next-generation reactors, with operations targeted by decade's end.
The contract represents the largest federal commitment yet to onshore production of a fuel type that almost no U.S. company can make at commercial scale today. Russia controls roughly 40 to 46 percent of global enrichment capacity, according to World Nuclear Association data, and the U.S. has virtually no domestic HALEU supply. Congress banned Russian uranium imports in May 2024 and appropriated $2.72 billion as part of broader DOE allocations to rebuild American capacity through the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act and subsequent DOE spending allocations.
It's a strategic gap that has quietly widened for decades while Washington focused on other priorities. Only now, with advanced reactor designs moving from paper to construction permits and tech giants hungry for carbon-free data center power, has the fuel supply bottleneck become impossible to ignore.
From Merlin Engines to Centrifuges
Nolan spent his early career at SpaceX working on the Dragon capsule before moving to Founders Fund as a partner, according to his Export-Import Bank biography. He founded General Matter in 2024, assembling a team drawn from SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, national laboratories, and the nuclear industry—a blend that mirrors the cross-pollination happening across the broader nuclear startup ecosystem, according to an April interview published by Coral Capital.
The startup closed a roughly $50 million Series A led by Founders Fund in April 2025. Peter Thiel took a board seat, a rare move for the investor who typically remains at arm's length from portfolio companies, Bloomberg reported at the time. By March, Axios Pro reported that General Matter was raising approximately $500 million at a roughly $2 billion pre-money valuation, though the company has not confirmed those figures.
In August 2025, General Matter secured a 100-acre lease at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War-era facility that the city estimates will require $1.5 billion in capital expenditure to transform into a modern enrichment operation supporting 140 full-time jobs. The company filed its NRC Part 70 license application on September 28, 2026, according to a General Matter press release and World Nuclear News coverage.
"We believe HALEU is the most urgent need in the market today, and the most sensitive to enrichment cost," Nolan told Reuters in December 2024. The company has not publicly disclosed which enrichment technology it will deploy, though centrifuge-based methods are presumed by outside analysts, including nuclear industry consultant Jared Watkins.
A Decade-Long Federal Bet
The DOE contract is structured as a milestone-based indefinite-delivery vehicle spanning ten years. A GovTribe listing shows a $1.135 billion delivery order issued March 4 under the master HALEU program, cross-referencing the broader federal support. The U.S. Export-Import Bank issued non-binding letters of interest in March worth up to $4.2 billion to support potential General Matter fuel sales to utilities in Japan and South Korea, timed to the Indo-Pacific Energy Ministers summit in Tokyo.
"This investment in American technology and operations for scalable, clean nuclear power is a defining moment for American energy security and dominance," Nolan said in the January statement. Whether the rhetoric matches reality will depend on execution timelines that have bedeviled nuclear projects for decades.
The DOE selected General Matter for its Nuclear Energy Launch Pad USA cohort in April, the only fuel-cycle company in the first group alongside reactor developers, according to American Nuclear Society coverage. By early 2026, the company had begun site preparation at Paducah, with DOE's Office of Environmental Management clearing infrastructure work to support construction schedules. A September DOE environmental assessment covers UF6 storage and auxiliary facilities ahead of full plant licensing, according to the agency's NEPA documentation.
The Market Opens
The timing may finally be right. DOE projects U.S. demand for HALEU will reach approximately 50 metric tons of uranium per year by 2035 and climb to roughly 500 metric tons annually by 2050, according to a Government Accountability Office report published in August citing the agency's 2024 environmental impact statement.
Centrus Energy delivered 900 kilograms of HALEU from its Piketon, Ohio demonstration cascade by June 25, 2025—the nation's first commercial production—but that facility remains limited in scale. Advanced reactor developers including TerraPower, X-energy, and others building sodium fast reactors, high-temperature gas reactors, and microreactors require HALEU fuel enriched above the 5 percent uranium-235 ceiling of conventional light-water reactor fuel.
TerraPower received an NRC construction permit for its Natrium demonstration plant in Wyoming on March 4, and X-energy secured the first Category II HALEU fuel fabrication license for its TRISO-X facility in Tennessee on February 13. X-energy said in an August investor update that it has long-term HALEU enrichment service agreements with both Centrus and General Matter, though General Matter has not independently confirmed downstream contracts.
Meanwhile, prices are rising. U.S. utilities purchased 13 million separative work units of enrichment services in 2025 at an average price of $108.70 per SWU, up 11 percent from $97.66 per SWU the prior year, according to Energy Information Administration data published in August. The price increase reflects tightening supply as utilities exit Russian contracts, the EIA noted.
An Emerging Competitive Field
General Matter will face competition from a small but growing group of enrichment players. Urenco USA operates a 4.3 million SWU-per-year centrifuge plant in Eunice, New Mexico and plans to expand capacity above 7 million SWU by 2036, starting with a 700,000 SWU addition completing in 2027. Centrus has DOE task orders to continue HALEU production at Piketon alongside the General Matter award, the GAO report said. Orano won a separate $900 million DOE award in January for low-enriched uranium enrichment and deconversion services.
Global Laser Enrichment is advancing an NRC application for a laser-based enrichment facility also in Paducah, proposing to re-enrich DOE depleted uranium tails up to 8 percent U-235, according to Federal Register notices. France's Orano is midway through a €1.7 billion expansion of its Georges Besse II plant at Tricastin to raise enrichment capacity by roughly 30 percent, backed by a €400 million European Investment Bank loan issued in March 2025.
The rush to build new enrichment capacity comes as technology companies race to secure carbon-free power for data centers. Microsoft signed a power purchase agreement tied to the restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1 in September 2024. Amazon expanded its Susquehanna nuclear PPA with Talen Energy in June 2025. NextEra Energy announced plans with Google to accelerate U.S. nuclear deployment including a targeted 2029 restart of Iowa's Duane Arnold plant. The International Energy Agency projects renewables will supply nearly 50 percent of data center demand growth by 2030, with nuclear playing a significant role post-2030 as small modular reactors arrive, according to the IEA's 2025 "Energy and AI" report.
The Silicon Valley Nuclear Wave
General Matter joins a wave of nuclear startups applying Silicon Valley capital formation and aerospace manufacturing culture to an industry historically dominated by utilities and state-backed enterprises. Radiant Industries, founded by ex-SpaceX engineers, won Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit selection in April for a microreactor project at Buckley Space Force Base. The question is whether rapid iteration and cost discipline can crack enrichment economics the way SpaceX reshaped launch.
General Matter's proposition is that fuel, not reactors, is the binding constraint on the U.S. nuclear buildout the DOE and White House now see as essential to energy security and decarbonization goals.
The company's NRC licensing timeline will determine how quickly it can begin commercial production. The agency finalized its Part 53 risk-informed framework for advanced reactors in 2026 and proposed modernizations to Part 70 materials licensing to reduce regulatory burden while maintaining safety standards. The ADVANCE Act, signed in July 2024, directed the NRC to streamline licensing and environmental reviews for new nuclear projects.
In the meantime, DOE has shipped 1.7 metric tons of HALEU from Japan to the U.S. in what the National Nuclear Security Administration called the largest-ever international HALEU transfer in May, a stopgap to supply early demonstration projects while domestic capacity ramps. Whether General Matter can meet its end-of-decade target and scale production to match the hundreds of metric tons DOE forecasts by mid-century will depend on licensing speed, technology execution, and capital deployment.
Those were the same variables that separated SpaceX from launch incumbents two decades ago. Nolan is betting he can pull off the same trick in a heavily regulated industry that moves at a very different pace. The next few years will tell whether that bet was audacious or simply premature.
