Imagine a world where America was the dominant producer of nuclear power in the world and the dominant producer of nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors.
We don't have to imagine it, because from the 1950s to the 1970s, that was the U.S. nuclear industry.
In the decades after the first commercial nuclear reactor came online in Pennsylvania in 1967, the United States was the go-to nation for nuclear power. Our companies built power plants, and we produced 90% of the nuclear fuel for those power plants. But in the late 1960s, other nations began to surpass us as new, more efficient designs were created, and the government could not innovate fast enough.
Scott Nolan, along with Lee Robinson, a former defense department executive, formed General Matter. The firm became the first start-up company in the U.S. to build a nuclear enrichment facility.
The significance of this is that the U.S. nuclear industry had been in deep hibernation for 50 years. As a result, Russia and China raced ahead of us.
“Imagine a world where every reactor being built around the world leads to a long tail of dependence on China and Russia,” Robinson said. “Imagine a world where our grid is unstable because we don’t have our own reactors. Where we have submarines and aircraft carriers that are dry-docked because we can’t fuel them. That’s the world we could be living in, in 2040.”
To his credit, Joe Biden saw the coming crisis and acted. In 2024, Biden announced a $3.4 billion contract up for grabs to companies that could create America's nuclear supply chain.
Last October, Biden announced that four companies, including General Matter, had been selected.
He said commercial nuclear reactors would face fuel shortages by the end of the 2020s; nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers by the end of the 2030s. New AI data centers, which are essential if we are to maintain an edge over Chinese competitors, will require double the amount of energy than the entire city of Philadelphia, and there won’t be enough electricity to power them. Blackouts and brownouts—already experienced in parts of California during summer heat waves—would spread across the country. Electricity bills for ordinary Americans would soar. China—which has rapidly expanded the size of its electrical grid over the past 10 years, whereas ours hasn’t grown significantly in decades—would leap ahead of America in industrial and technological might, driven by the sheer supply of energy produced by its power plants.
Not if General Matter can help it.
“All of America’s ambitions rely on energy,” said Scott Nolan, the company's CEO. “So General Matter’s goal is to bring back domestic capability for making nuclear fuel.”
As with many issues relating to nuclear power, Barack Obama was one of the main culprits in America's loss of ability to produce nuclear fuel. He closed the last domestic producer of fuel for reactors in 2012. Since then, we've been forced to rely on Russia for fuel.
Biden finally banned the import of nuclear fuel from Russia in 2023, but stipulated that the ban would not go into effect until 2028. At that point, even a crash building program to increase our capability to produce fuel won't be enough. There will be shortages.
Nolan is well aware of the challenges.
In 2007, he left SpaceX and did a stint in consulting at Bain & Company before joining Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm. There, Nolan turned his attention to finding and investing in a company that could modernize the nuclear energy sector, in the same way SpaceX modernized the U.S.’s aeronautical industry.
“I spent over a year at Founders Fund looking for the right company to invest in nuclear,” he told me. During this period, he encountered company after company aiming to build advanced, modern nuclear reactors—but each one of them faced the same problem.
“They could not get nuclear fuel from anywhere except for Russia,” Nolan said.
It made innovation a moot point. Why construct new nuclear power plants if, by 2028, importing their fuel would be impossible?
“Because of how fraught our energy supply chains were, the reason we might lose a global conflict was because of energy security,” Nolan explained. “It wasn’t because of weapons capability or because of troop readiness.”
Nolan said that near the end of 2020, the Defense Department “began to recognize the need for nuclear power to provide a vital part of our energy resiliency.”
The timing for General Matter is perfect. There's been a huge shift in attitudes toward nuclear power, what Nolan calls a "post-partisan consensus."
“I think it was the right realizing that emitting more carbon is not a good experiment to run, and the left realizing that wind and solar won’t get us there,” said Nolan. “The only thing that can solve clean, safe, abundant energy affordably is actually nuclear.”
Currently, the U.S. produces 20% of its power via nuclear reactors. Donald Trump wants to quadruple that output by 2050. His goal is to make the U.S. dominant in energy production.
“What energy dominance means,” Nolan said, is energy "abundance." Enough energy to power reindustrialization, the AI revolution, and any other challenge that America will face.
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