The Startup Bringing The Spacex Playbook To Nuclear Power

PADUCAH, Kentucky — Not many people would see potential in a forest on a hazardous waste site, but Scott Nolan and the federal government believe it will drive the future of American energy.

For Nolan, the plot of land just outside Paducah is ideal for his company, General Matter, to repeat what he did with Elon Musk at SpaceX: breathe new life into a sector that was at the center of the mid-20th century’s technology revolution.

This time it’s the nuclear power industry that he hopes to revive.

While his approach has drawn detractors inside the industry, Nolan, General Matter’s co-founder and CEO, has attracted allies across the political spectrum, a sign of how the politics of nuclear have changed. That includes an ambitious governor eager to tout his own ability to bridge partisan divides.

“It has investment both from Peter Thiel-backed groups and John Kerry-backed groups,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) told POLITICO, referring to the right-wing investor and former Biden administration climate envoy, respectively.

“I mean, it's truly bringing together folks that have vastly different politics but [are] looking for what is the best answer to meeting our energy demands in the future,” he added before addressing a gathering, which also included then-White House senior policy strategist Emily Underwood, boxer-influencer Jake Paul and Nolan.

The event in Paducah marked one year since General Matter broke ground on its flagship nuclear enrichment facility, which it expects will double America’s production of enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. What’s now a Superfund site was the last U.S.-owned enrichment complex, making the project a powerful emblem for what Paul, an investor in the startup, called “American reindustrialization.”

The nuclear sector boomed in the 1960s as utilities embraced the Atomic Age optimism that a former top U.S. nuclear regulator said would produce power "too cheap to meter" — but it fell out of favor within decades after suffering a handful of high-profile disasters and soaring costs. More recently, the closure of the old Paducah plant that once supplied the potent fuel to dozens of power stations has left the U.S. industry heavily dependent on foreign suppliers.

Now, the development of new, smaller and potentially safer nuclear reactors and the push to end the industry’s awkward reliance on uranium fuel imports from U.S. geopolitical adversary Russia — as well as billions in funding from Washington — have opened the door for the audacious, tech-savvy team led by Nolan to show they can master the complex process of producing enough enriched uranium to fuel a new generation of nuclear power plants.

Nolan, who is also a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, got his engineering start with Boeing before joining SpaceX as roughly its 30th employee. He left just before its first successful launch but remained wowed by the startup’s ability to advance commercial rocket technology, ultimately dominating the field. Now, advancing nuclear power is Nolan’s obsession.

“I enjoyed investing and didn’t plan to start another company,” Nolan said, recalling 2023 when he began a deep dive into nuclear power that included a foray into microreactors. “I met most of the advanced reactor startups, and in asking them what the most difficult thing about their business was, it wasn't regulation, it wasn't technology — it was access to fuel.”

The Manhattan Beach project

“Advanced reactor” is something of an umbrella term encompassing designs that are smaller or use different cooling systems than the 96 large, conventional reactors operating across the U.S.

Nolan, like many other investors, saw that nuclear power was drawing support in Washington, with new designs promising better economics and safety. But unlike many financiers, he saw another roadblock.

Currently, the U.S. only produces 30% of the standard low-enriched uranium needed to fuel existing reactors. Meanwhile, most advanced reactor designs will require high-assay low-enriched uranium — or HALEU — which is four times more concentrated and only commercially sold by Russia.

With a U.S. ban on Russian uranium imports set to take full effect in 2028, conventional and especially advanced nuclear companies are bracing for a beating.

It’s not easy to just enrich more, either. For one, centrifuges, the world’s predominant enrichment technology, are “very sensitive,” according to Dale Klein, a professor at the University of Texas and former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair.

The vertical cylinders spin gaseous uranium at high speeds, forcing heavier, less valuable atoms to the outside to be peeled off. “If they're out of balance and they ever start to wiggle a little bit, then they tend to blow apart,” Klein said.

Plus there’s “the classified nature of enrichment technology, which can be used in a nuclear weapons program,” said Daniel Poneman, a former acting Energy secretary. Accordingly, there are formidable government guardrails.

It’s unsurprising, then, that Nolan was wary of entering the business in 2023.

That’s when Leslie Dewan —a nuclear engineer with connections across the sector — put Nolan in touch with her acquaintance in the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit named Lee Robinson. Robinson was running due diligence for the Department of Defense microreactor program, and fuel constraints were just getting on his radar.

That fall, Nolan, Dewan, Robinson and Andrew Higier — the director of the Defense Innovation Unit’s energy portfolio — gathered at the Defense Department unit’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, for a 30-minute meeting that ended up dragging on for three hours.

Robinson left the meeting with a personal mission. “I spent three months just basically walking the halls of DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Defense, and national labs to find out what the severity of this problem is,” he said.

Nolan’s efforts to find an existing company he could invest in to produce enriched uranium had come up short. He rejected the legacy enrichers. The centrifuge design used by the U.S.-based Centrus Energy Corp., he concluded, was not commercially competitive, and its European competitors, Urenco and Orano, were not interested in expanding aggressively enough to meet potential market growth.

In December 2023, Robinson flew to Los Angeles and bee-lined for Manhattan Beach, where he met up with Nolan. The pair talked and walked, making their way to the pier on a quintessential Southern California winter morning.

“Nobody else is going to do this,” Robinson told Nolan on the pier. “If we don't do this, nobody else is going to do it.”

Nolan had already reached the same conclusion, and he knew the right investor: Thiel, the PayPal founder and mentor to Vice President JD Vance whose net worth is now estimated at $32 billion. The two first met at Stanford University while Thiel was teaching and Nolan was studying for his MBA, and they've since spent 15 years at Founders Fund together.

Even though they recognized the enormity of the challenge, they filed paperwork in January 2024, and General Matter was officially born. Nolan was the principal founder, aided by co-founders Robinson, renewable energy executive Drew DeWalt, former Urenco officer Ashby Bridges and fellow SpaceX alum Emily Henriksson. Thiel even took a seat on the board, a rare move for a man accustomed to staying in the background.

The race for enrichment

Fast forward to this fall, and General Matter has won multiple contracts with advanced reactor companies like X-energy and Antares Nuclear, the U.S. government, and major American utilities already operating nuclear plants, according to a person close to the company granted anonymity to discuss confidential information.

Robinson confirmed the company is “working with a wide range of partners like utilities, advanced reactor developers and the U.S. government,” but did not comment on contracts.

When DOE announced its landmark, congressionally funded enrichment awards earlier this year, General Matter came away with $900 million. So did Centrus and Orano, while Global Laser Enrichment snagged $28 million and Urenco got snubbed.

Multiple people familiar with the bidding process for that $2.7 billion in Energy Department funding who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues said General Matter’s ambitious timelines worked in its favor. Its connections to Thiel — an ally of President Donald Trump and Vance — also gave it an edge.

One person familiar with the DOE contracts said the company offered 355 metric tons of HALEU annually for the $900 million. With its $900 million, Centrus said it would initially deliver 12 metric tons annually and subsequently scale up.

To keep the momentum, General Matter needs speed, Nolan said.

“A failure mode would be going too slowly,” he said. If they’re not online “in 2029 or sooner,” existing reactors could suffer under a full Russian uranium ban. If they dally too long on HALEU, “the industry doesn't take off the way it can.”

Another deal is already on the table. In March, the U.S. Export-Import Bank pledged $4.2 billion in debt financing for Japan and South Korea if they decide to purchase General Matter uranium.

Washington is looking to accelerate nuclear more broadly, too, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission streamlining the licensing pathway for various nuclear facilities.

Nolan says he is applying four main principles from SpaceX to his new endeavor. First, identify the “dominating” obstacle — the supply and price of fuel, in this case. Second, keep the team small and focused on that obstacle. Third, recruit both industry experts and outsiders. Finally, “think from first principles about what the technology should look like.”

Its founders were worried about making mistakes that tripped up other enrichment companies. To get around fixed ideas about technology and engineering, Nolan and the team sought engineers experienced with nuclear power who worked on other areas of the fuel cycle.

The SpaceX approach cuts both ways, says Poneman, who was previously CEO of Centrus, the privatized company that is the descendant of the U.S. government’s Cold War enrichment program.

“When I was at Centrus, we wanted to try to graft SpaceX people and thinking,” he said. “There were a couple of challenges.”

For one, enrichment has decades of government-led research behind it. Starting with a clean slate of ideas for using new technology carries risks. Secondly, he noted, much of the best research on enrichment technology is classified because of its ties to the atomic bomb.

The Founders Fund Strategy

General Matter hasn’t publicly disclosed even the most basic characteristics of its enrichment technology, such as whether it will use out-of-fashion gaseous diffusion, standard centrifuges or newer laser-driven methods.

General Matter says it will reveal its basic technology in the coming months. But under the company’s other playbook — taken from Nolan’s concurrent employer — the concealment might as well be marketing by mystique.

Nolan is leaning into his Founders Fund experience — and reputation — to satisfy investors who are drawn to his personality and SpaceX success. He has likened a company’s technology to a horse and its CEO to the jockey: While traditional thinking sees the technology as the most important factor, Thiel’s Founders Fund anchors its investments to a company’s founder.

“I'm a founder-first, idea-second investor,” said Blake Lieberman, a venture capitalist who flew to the Paducah event last month from Texas to “check in” on his General Matter investment.

“At the end of the day, it's a team,” Lieberman said. “Look at how it got incubated inside of Founders, Peter [Thiel] on the board, the talent that they’ve hired on the research side.”

The competition

Still, General Matter joined the race late. They need to catch up with Centrus, Urenco, and Orano — companies with decades-long successful track records in making fuel for conventional reactors — as well as startup Global Laser Enrichment’s years of research and development and support from nuclear giant Cameco.

While the publicly traded Centrus has struggled to enrich its own uranium at scale since it was spun out from the U.S. government, its Ohio plant upriver from Paducah does produce HALEU at a pilot scale.

“Our technology is proven, licensed by the NRC, and has been producing HALEU for nearly three years,” said Dan Leistikow, vice president for corporate communications at Centrus. Centrus noted recent fuel supply contracts with X-energy, Radiant Nuclear and Antares Nuclear.

Urenco — a consortium of the British, Dutch and German governments — is the only company enriching significant amounts of uranium in the U.S. today, and it’s undergoing a 15% capacity expansion in New Mexico to be completed in 2027.

France’s Orano, meanwhile, is considering building a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that would be the state’s largest investment ever.

Small reactor startups like Kairos Power and TerraPower are projecting they will launch their inaugural commercial power plants around 2030. And those reactors might not be able to wait out an enrichment setback.

General Matter expects to begin production at Paducah before 2030. But industry insiders question General Matter’s ability to move as quickly as it’s promising. While the company’s Paducah site is cleared and ready for initial building, according to construction head Chris Williams, it has not yet entered the historically yearslong process of applying for a federal license that would allow for the start of safety-related construction.

The company plans to submit its application to the NRC by the end of September, and the agency has dramatically sped up reviews in recent months, but General Matter is also advocating for a Congressional workaround that cleared both House and Senate committees on bipartisan votes.

General Matter's focus on speed is an issue for competitors who are quietly critical of the company. They worry that the company’s lack of experience in the high-stakes technology, coupled with a dash for quick deployment, will lead to cutting corners on long-term efficiencies or safety.

“There's a cultural issue here that we can't gloss over,” said an official with a competing company. “The nuclear industry has spent decades building our safety-focused culture, and we can't sacrifice that. In a small industry, like ours, one issue from someone anywhere is everybody's issue.”

But General Matter says it understands its safety obligations, and its technology is just refining engineering on well-established enrichment science.

“Safety is fundamental to our business model. Without it, we can’t win on speed, cost and efficiency,” Robinson said. “Our mission to fix what has stagnated for decades has attracted the best personnel in the industry, and whose centuries of combined nuclear experience will help us meet America's energy needs faster and more reliably than any legacy incumbent.”

Besides, the company wears its outsider status with pride — and many love them for it.

“They offer a new approach to a broken industry. We need a new approach to uranium, and they bring it,” said a former DOE official, granted anonymity to speak freely.