Former SpaceX engineer seeks to help end US dearth of special uranium fuel

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Former SpaceX engineer Scott Nolan, CEO of startup General Matter, is on a mission to help end Russia's monopoly on a type of more-enriched nuclear fuel by producing it at commercial scale in the United States and slashing its costs.

Nolan incorporated San Francisco-based General Matter this year in order to make high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, for a variety of planned atomic plants including small modular reactors, or SMRs, that backers hope will take off in the 2030s.

HALEU is uranium enriched to between 5% and 20%, which backers say has the potential to make new high-tech reactors more efficient. Uranium fuel used in today's reactors is enriched to about 5%. Big Tech companies such as Amazon AMZN.O have plans to build new reactors to serve power-hungry data centers.

"We believe HALEU is the most urgent need in the market today, and the most sensitive to enrichment cost," Nolan told Reuters in his first media interview since forming the company.

"We are focused not only on bringing back domestic capacity, but on bringing the cost down significantly," Nolan said.

The goal of General Matters is to halve the cost of HALEU enrichment, long term, Nolan said. HALEU is made primarily in Russia, and its price is elusive. Estimates range from $25,000 to $35,000 per kilogram of uranium.

The U.S. Department of Energy in October awarded initial contracts to four companies including General Matters seeking to produce HALEU in the United States - part of an initiative to kick start domestic production. The United States plans to award $2.7 billion in contracts for HALEU, subject to Congress in coming years, the department said.

General Matters, which currently has no infrastructure to make uranium fuel, will face stiff competition from other companies with experience and facilities in the uranium industry.

The other companies with U.S. support are: Urenco USA, a European firm with operations in New Mexico; Orano USA, based in Maryland with global headquarters in France; and Centrus Energy's LEU.A subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating.

Critics of the use of HALEU have said that the level of its enrichment means it is a weapons risk, and they recommend limiting its enrichment to 10% to 12%. Nolan said his company will look to regulators to determine the level.

Nolan is also a partner in Founders Fund, a venture capital fund that was the first institutional investor in SpaceX and that Peter Thiel, a prominent supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, helped launch.

Nolan said he expects that nuclear energy "should and will be" an important part of Trump's efforts to expand sources of baseload electricity.

SPACEX EXPERIENCE

Nolan worked at Elon Musk's private aerospace company SpaceX from 2003 to 2007. Nolan said his company's planned HALEU production will share SpaceX's focus on developing new technology and cutting costs.

"SpaceX combined people from Silicon Valley in the software startup industry with the aerospace industry, and converged these two skill sets," Nolan said.

"We're doing something similar, where we have deep experience on the team from the fuel cycle in the nuclear space, and are combining it with experience from the technology industry to rethink the problem and come at it from a new direction," Nolan said.

A General Matters spokesperson said Nolan has not been in contact with Musk since "well before" the idea of the company was conceived in 2023.

Nolan did not reveal what kind of technology General Matter plans to use to produce HALEU. Uranium production is dominated by centrifuges that spin at high speeds. Some new players are also trying to use lasers to produce uranium fuel.

"Some are more commercially proven. Some are still to be proven from a technology standpoint that they can scale," Nolan said.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Will Dunham)

((timothy.gardner@thomsonreuters.com))