General Matter's Scott Nolan on Cheeky Pint: why enriched uranium is nuclear power's real bottleneck
What's the story? Scott Nolan, co-founder and CEO of General MatterDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, sat down with Stripe co-founder John Collison on the Cheeky Pint podcast (published 3 November 2026) to explain why enriched uranium, not reactor licensing, is the bottleneck for US nuclear power. Nolan says the idea came in mid-2023, after ten years as an investor at Founders Fund: when he asked reactor startups what their hardest problem was, they told him it was getting fuel, almost all of which comes from Russia or Europe.
Why fuel is the choke point: Most US reactors run on uranium enriched to 3-5%, but small modular and advanced reactors want HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium, just under 20%), which allows a smaller, factory-built core that stays critical for longer. Only Russia makes HALEU commercially today. Nolan says the US still imports about a quarter of its enriched uranium from Russia, and a Congressional ban on Russian imports takes effect on 1 January 2028. For some small reactors, he adds, fuel including enrichment can be as much as 50% of the levelised cost of energy at today's prices.
Where General Matter is: Founded at the end of 2023, the company has just over 200 people, headquarters and engineering in Los Angeles, and is building its first plant on a 100-acre Department of Energy site in Paducah, Kentucky, where the US last enriched uranium until 2013. It picked Paducah after a year-long search across more than 10 states and over 1,000 plots of land. It won a $900 million DOE award for HALEU capacity, runs its own in-house engineering, procurement and construction team on the Tesla model, and says it will reveal its enrichment technique in the first half of 2027. Its target is production by the end of the decade; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted its license application on 29 October, WKMS reports.
The bigger argument: Nolan argues nuclear stalled less because of safety scares than because of cost: 20% of the Vogtle plant's overruns were interest payments, and 1970s-80s interest rates made decade-long builds unfinanceable. He also blames cost-plus contracting, which he saw as a Boeing intern before joining SpaceX as one of its first interns in 2003. On X he framed the pattern: high-margin industries that stagnate for decades have high barriers to entry and room for startups with modern engineering, as SpaceX, Tesla and Anduril showed, and nuclear is next.
Read more: Cheeky Pint transcript, John Collison (X), Scott Nolan (X), WKMS
Image: Cheeky Pint episode video
