Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Even as momentum grows for U.S. nuclear, the fuel supply chain is often overlooked. This dynamic is shifting as the industry wakes up to critical choke points and a heavy reliance on countries like Russia for enrichment. As America aims to reduce geopolitical dependency in energy, fixing these domestic gaps has become a strategic priority. In this episode — a companion to a separate episode of Catalyst focused on nuclear waste — Shayle Kann speaks with Scott Nolan, the CEO of General Matter. The company is focused on enrichment, one of the most acute risk areas in the supply chain. Shayle and Scott also discuss the big-picture state of nuclear fuel, from mining to advanced reactor requirements. The two cover topics like: The five-step nuclear fuel supply chain America’s continued reliance on Russian enrichment: The history of enrichment decline in the US The "chicken or egg" problem for advanced reactors Distinctions between LEU and HALEU fuel Enrichment’s toll-service business model The strategic importance of General Matter’s enrichment facility in Paducah, Kentucky Catalyst: The state and future of nuclear waste Catalyst: The path to market for new nuclear reactors Catalyst: The US nuclear groundswell Open Circuit: Inside Meta’s massive nuclear push Open Circuit: Fear and loathing at the Department of Energy Latitude Media: What TerraPower’s big milestone says about future nuclear projects Latitude Media: Commonwealth Fusion Systems launches digital twin with Nvidia and Siemens Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Latitude Media covering the new frontiers of the energy transition. I'm Shail Khan. I lead the early stage venture strategy and energy impact partners. Welcome to Catalysts. So for all the talk about a nuclear renaissance that maybe, hopefully, is coming in the U.S., and actually is already here in places like Korea and in China, I don't think there's enough talk about the fuel supply chain. Last week, we talked about the end of that supply chain, which is waste. But at the front end, which is how do we get from mine,

uranium to fuel that goes into a nuclear reactor, that has been changing a little bit. People are talking about it more, especially as folks start to wake up to the choke points that currently exists in that supply chain and our reliance in certain areas of that supply chain on countries like Russia, surprisingly enough. And what that means for the geopolitics of energy and an era of nuclear power expansion. The last thing we want, obviously, is to scale up an industry that introduces a new supply chain dependency that we're going to regret later. So clearly better to fix it now. That is what Scott Nolan, our guest today and the CEO of General Matter, is looking to do.

He's focused on a specific part of that supply chain in Richmond, which, as you'll hear, is one of the areas where that risk is most acute. But Scott and I talk bigger picture as well, everything from mining to fuel. That's coming up after the break. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energyhub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments

aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability.

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Scott, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. All right. Let's start by having you give me a walkthrough of the uranium fuel supply chain, the nuclear fuel supply chain. So like take me from soup to nuts. What do we start with and what do we end with? Yeah, happy to. I mean, the background is that every reactor needs fuel, as most people know. And we can talk about types of fuel, but all fuel in reactors in the, US today is made using a five-step process. So step one is you mine uranium out of the ground. You then convert it to a gas that's called the conversion step. You then enrich it, which is really

refining separation step. You then deconvert it into a solid, back into a solid. And with that solid, you then make fuel fabrication. So fuel pellets or trisop particles or whatever that is. So five steps total. The U.S. does all of the steps. The U.S. does not do the middle step at commercial scale. So that's where the bottleneck is, which I'm sure we'll talk about today. Yeah, so let's get straight to the geopolitics, I guess, or at least the geography of it. So as it stands today, what's a typical supply chain look like starting from mining through to ultimately usage in a reactor? Yeah, so with mining, U.S. gets mined product from a bunch of sources, including from mines in the U.S.

but Canada is a very large producer and Kazakhstan's a large producer and Australia also has great deposits but if you look at today, it's really Kazakhstan, Canada are going to drive it for the U.S. That's where we get most of the U-308 that we consume. Conversion is also international.

We have one facility doing conversion in the U.S. That's Honeywell sold under Converdine in southern Illinois. is actually five miles from where our facility is. So that's in Metropolis, Illinois. You also have conversion in Canada, outside Toronto, done by Camaco, and then you've got the Europeans who also do conversion. Can we pause on that one for one second?

We're going to talk more about enrichment because that's what you're focused on, but just spending a moment on conversion. That is crazy. There has been one conversion plant owned by Honeywell and spun out Alice Solstice. advanced materials, operating in the U.S., as you said, in Illinois for what, like 50 years or some crazy, long creative time, literally

only one. It continues to operate. I think they recently announced that they're expanding capacity by like 20% or something like that. But, I mean, you're obviously focused on like alleviating a supply chain bottleneck as we will soon talk about. How big a challenge do you think that one is?

Yes, I mean, the whole history on the facility, like you said, you know, 50-plus years of operation. originally a joint venture between General Atomic and Honeywell. And then it was always marketed under Converdine, which was really the sales arm of that joint venture. And then, like you said, spun out under Solis. So as, you know, in the 2010s, as the market hit a rough patch

and just there wasn't a belief that there was going to be expansion of nuclear and people's inventory swelled. The conversion market had a tough time, and that facility was actually a mothball. And then it was brought back. And so it's been getting a ramped back up the last couple of years. I think that's where you're referring to is working all the way towards nameplate capacity and then potentially further. And so we've seen that facility expand production.

They've had some great wins on that front the last couple of years. But, you know, there's going to be a limit to how far they can expand it at that site. And so, you know, enrichment's really the main bottleneck in the industry, certainly in the the domestic industry, conversion is probably the second. And there's been a few people that have been talking about building new conversion facilities. So we think it's something that'll get solved over the next five to ten years. Again, we'll get to enrichment in just a moment. But so the output of a conversion facility is what you purchase. How much do you, I mean, you know, if we don't expand conversion, let's say, in the U.S. and that Honeywell plant continues to operate, but we do see

more demand for new nuclear, more demand for new nuclear fuel, you guys scale up and want to continue to scale up, how big a challenge is it for you that there is this like fixed limited conversion capacity in the U.S.? Presumably you can go buy, but UF6 is what comes out of a conversion facility, you can go buy it from Canada or Kazakhstan or whatever, but is that problematic? Is that hard to do? We're not too worried about it. So, you know, we've looked carefully at that market today. There's still spare capacity.

There's still a good amount of inventory in the market. And so we think that it can support a certain amount of U.S. enrichment. expansion, but at some point, you know, post like a doubling of U.S. enrichment on U.S. soil, you're probably looking at needing to expand conversion in one way or another. And if you looked at the NEI did a survey on this, Nuclear Energy Institute, they did a survey, I believe it was last year on people's concerns of bottlenecks in the supply chain by utilities. And I believe that the utilities all converged on conversion. being the next big bottleneck that would have to be solved. In response to that, there's a few

companies that have been talking about building conversion facilities, and conversions are relatively known process that's done without a lot of technical difficulty in Europe and in Canada and even in the U.S. And so we expect that that'll get done and it'll be a bottleneck that's removed as the market needs it to be within the next five years, five to ten years. Okay, so one way or another, somebody does conversion, you get UF6. Okay, so now we go to enrichment, which is your focus. What happens in enrichment, first of all, and then we can talk about where it happens? Right. And so to go back to one thing you were saying, just the chemistry of all this,

so you mine product out of the ground, it's really a mining and milling step. There are originally two separate steps back when you used, you know, traditional mining. Now most people are doing in-situary, ISR. and so that's more of, you know, like a pumping and extraction process. And so milling and mining are now combined into one step where the output is yellow cake, U308. And then going through the conversion process, what you're doing is stripping off the oxygens and adding fluorine. And so you go from U308 to UF6. And so that's the chemical that we use in our process.

That's what utilities bring us. So I think you said, hey, that's the material that you buy. due to the way that the fuel buying process works, in most cases, the utility actually buys it and brings it to us, and we're doing a service to that product. Which is super interesting. So the enrichment process is more like tolling than anything else. The ultimate end customer, which is the nuclear plant operator,

buys, they don't buy fuel. Ultimately, they buy a precursor to fuel and then toll it through an enrichment facility. Yep. So utilities generally purchase the uranium. They hold title in the uranium, and then everything downstream of the mining step, the procurement of the U308 is really an upgrade service to that uranium. And so everything downstream is basically a tolling operation

as services per kilo or per some other unit operation. And so for our operation, it's something called separate of work units. And so you can think of it as degree of entropy reduction times the amount of mass. And so we're getting paid for reducing entropy or separating or refining. All these are essentially the same thing. And so what our operation does is we take in UF6. And if we're making LAU, it's traditionally going to come in as natural UF6, which is 0.711% U235, the rest U238.

and what you do in enrichment is you enhance, you enrich the amount of that material that's U-235. That's the Fisal material. That's what you need to make working uranium-based nuclear fuel, and that's what we're trying to enrich. And so through this process, you're essentially separating a gas, and you're separating it again and again

until you have the level of U-235 that you want, which can be about 5%, 3 to 5%, if you're doing low-enriched uranium for a traditional reactor, or it can be as high as 19.75% for HALU, high-Say-L-U for advanced reactors. Yeah, I want to talk about that L-EU and HALU bit in just a moment, but just to contextualize for everybody, if you were theoretically making weapons-grade uranium,

how much enrichment would you need to do? Well, weapons-grade is anything above 20%. And so the amount of enrichment. Right, so your sub-weapons grade in any of these cases. Yeah, and weapons grade is considered above 20%. So how far you take it to, you know, that's what's going to determine how much more enrichment you need to do. But it's essentially all enrichment is, you know, a repeated process of refining until you get

to the level that you're seeking. Okay, so back to the supply chain then. So we mine our uranium, maybe in the U.S., but probably in Canada or in Kazakhstan. we convert it, again, maybe in the U.S. through one facility, but more likely, again, in Canada or in Europe, where then today does the enrichment typically take place? Yeah, so this is what really put us onto this problem and deciding, hey, we need to really start a company to address enrichment in the U.S. was, if you look at enrichment today and what the U.S. consumes, it's about 75% Europe, European producers, and it's about 25% Russia.

And so we can talk about the history of how we got here, but there's no commercial ad-scale U.S. producer operating anywhere. There is one facility in the U.S. that's run by a European firm called Urenko down in New Mexico, and that produces about 20% of U.S. demand, but the other 80% is coming from overseas, and a full 20, 25% is Russia, depending on the year. Yeah, let's talk about that Russia thing for just a minute. has the U.S. industry's ability to purchase or toll, I guess, through Russian enrichment facilities, has that changed over time as the U.S. Russian relations have moved? Like, I get the sense as one of

these areas that, like, we kind of don't like to talk about it because we're sort of reliant on Russia to some extent right now, but we need it, you know, and so we're sort of unwilling to sanction it or stop buying from Russia? Do I have that sort of right? Well, in 2024, there was a Russian uranium imports ban passed by Congress. And so there's a waiver process that's ongoing right now where the Secretary of Energy can waive the ban if a utility needs it, and there's not another source, which has been the case.

That waiver process expires January 1st, 2028. And so the setup today is, yes, it's still three quarters Europe, one quarter Russia. Most of that Russian uranium is coming in. It's all coming in under those waivers. I think it's gone from about 25% to 20% as utilities look to diversify and get ahead of the full 2028 ban. But that is currently the breakdown. A lot of people have asked how do we even get here? How is it the case that we're still importing from Russia?

you have to go all the way back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War. So 80s, the U.S. was the leader in global enrichment, something like 86% at the peak. And then the Berlin Wall fell, and we entered a treaty with Russia, which was called the Megatons to Megawatts program. And in that trade program, we imported Russian warheads. We downblended them and used that downblended material to. run our reactors, we then sent the depleted uranium back to Russia to be, or the, we sent the depleted uranium back to Russia to be enriched. And so they built up a large enrichment capability over time using gas centrifuges while the U.S. was still doing gas

use diffusion, which was a first generation technology. And so then over the subsequent, you know, 20 years, the U.S. progressively shut down its own enrichment, first privatizing. and then realizing it was just really hard to operate profitably in the face of European producers and Russian enrichment who were both using gas centrifuges, which was, again, Generation 2 technology, which was superior to the Generation 1 gas cuspusion that the U.S. was using. And so we went from a place of 86% global market share down to less than 0.1% today, but U.S. companies or U.S. entities. And so that's the state of things. From the utilities point of view, they do need enriched uranium to feed the reactors,

and we don't want the grid to have brownouts just due to not having fuel for them. And so they've used the waiver process to bring in Russian uranium. And now we're facing the 2028 cliff. And so really it's how do we fill this LU supply gap that's coming our way in 2028, and ideally doing it with domestic sources? Okay, so I want to finish the supply chain and then come back to the different fuel types, L.E.U. and HALU and what that means for enrichment. But just to finish the supply chain side of it, so you do the enrichment and then you have to do deconversion, right? Does deconversion

normally happen in a centralized facility? Is it on site near the reactor? What does that final step look like? That's the second to last step. You solve the fuel fabrication step, and they're usually co-located. So the deconversion step does not take up a lot of acreage, and it's usually combined with the fuel fabrication step. And so a lot

of times those are referred to as the same step, or at least priced as the same step. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform

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Okay. So then back to enrichment, there are, I mean, broadly speaking, two categories of fuels that at least I know you're focused on and that I think matter from the perspective of the industry. One, which is the incumbent fuel, LEU, and then the second, which is for kind of the next gen, the Gen 4 reactors, which generally run on HALU. Can you just walk me through the difference between those two and both in general and then like what it means for what you have to build for enrichment capacity? Right. Yeah. So like you said, there's really two types of fuel, LEU and HALU that are used in nuclear energy, which is what we're focused on. LEU is anywhere from 3 to 5% enriched of U235 by weight.

HALU is technically anywhere 5 to 20%. But really, it's typically going to be 15 to 19.75%. And the reason it's 19.75 is you want to keep some buffer against the 20% that really triggers weapons grade classification and a whole bunch of international standards. And so the reason that there's two different levels, if we go back to the underlying tech, the traditional reactors that you have that are gigawatt scale and are very large, You know, those have a large core, and so they don't need a lot of enrichment to get fuel to go critical. You have a larger amount of fuel in there, and it can burn for a longer period of time with still pretty good efficiency.

And so that's traditionally been done to 3 to 5%. As we look to factory-build reactors and make them smaller, the core has to get smaller. And so to get criticality, to get good burn-up and refueling cycles that work for SMRs, you end up wanting to go higher, and people have chosen to go, in some cases, 15, 16%. In most cases, though, all the way to 19.75. So most of the advanced reactors that you hear about are going to be using 19.75 enriched fuel, and, you know, we're making both of those. And let's be clear on what we talked about with the existing supply chain.

basically everything we're talking about with the existing supply chain is L-EU. That's right. Partially because those advanced reactors don't mostly exist yet, or at least they're not commercial in the market. But HALU there is zero current capacity or essentially zero? I mean, walking through like, if I wanted to go buy HALU tomorrow, what would that look like? You would have to purchase it from Russia.

And so that's what actually triggered me looking into the space. So if we rewind to like late 2022, at Founders Fund, I was looking at all the advanced reactors companies, deciding to invest in one. I asked them what the hardest thing about building their company was going to be, and it was purchasing fuel, it was obtaining HALU. And they said, the only place we can get it is actually Russia, and we have to import it.

And so I said, well, why don't you just get the U.S. companies to make HALU? Is it that much harder to go to a higher level? And they said there really is no U.S. owned production. And so that kicked this all off. And I realized pretty quickly that Russia was the only source, and unless there was a new source that came online very soon, really by end of decade, all the advanced reactor companies would have a hard time scaling up.

And so, you know, fast forward to today, the DOE has actually stepped up and made some Halo available to advanced reactors. But that's really only going to take them through first demonstrations, first deployments to really scale up will need a new supply. And so you have Europe saying that they're going to bring capability online in Europe in the early 2030s.

And then the other two companies saying that they're, you know, who are planning to produce HALU is us at our facility in Paducah, Kentucky. And so we'll be bringing that online by the end of the decade. And then centrist, the U.S. incumbent has also been working on HALU capacity and planning to scale that up. So for you, I mean, I think you can imagine to a first order that, okay, if you're going to do enrichment and you're going to make LU and then you just need to go further, enrich more

to get to HALU, you just run more separation steps. You run your system for longer, and it's one system, but you enrich to whatever degree you need to enrich to. My understanding from chatting with you is it's not actually quite that simple, and it is kind of a different process, or at least you want different equipment if you're going to be producing LEU versus HALU. So at the high level, can you just walk through, like, are those the same process run at different frequencies or for different lengths, or is it actually a different process? I think the thing to remember is this is all really just a separation distillation process. And so producing HALU, you typically ingest L-EU, and then you'll enrich that up to HALU. And so it's really a repeated process.

Now, the things that are different, the important things that are different are around criticality and licensing. And, you know, the licensing is different to reflect the criticality difference and a few other differences. But fundamentally, the process does not have to change from a physics standpoint. what does have to change is things like you mentioned. Things that hold uranium, a certain volume of uranium, may need to be smaller in the case of HALU to make sure that you can't have accidental criticality and that you're ensuring safety. But I would say that that's the primary difference between the two is criticality considerations, which is why you see, you know, in the past couple of years the DOE putting out awards for

HALU enrichment specifically and LU enrichment capability and then also HALU deconversion. And so that last step that you asked about, those last two steps of deconversion and fuel fabrication, as you bring HALUF6 down into solid form, you're now getting even more density of uranium. And so as it's at a HALU level,

up to 19.75% U-235, and you're bringing that back into a solid. That's where you have to be a little bit more careful about your processes and equipment. I'm interested from like a business and market perspective. It feels like L.EU and HALU are in such different places, right? LU, you've got this like firm, stable demand of the existing reactor fleet that is operating,

and it could grow because we're going to build some new reactors over time, but, you know, from a large base. So incrementally, it's not going to be that much. So you kind of know how much HALU demand there is right now. So you could come in and just supplant part of the existing supply chain there, hopefully the 25% that we get from Russia. Whereas HALU, it's starting from essentially zero. And it's also kind of a chicken or egg question with a bunch of advanced reactors of like those things need to come online. They need to scale up at some rate.

We don't know exactly what rate they're going to scale up at. And so you're going to produce capacity to make HALU and you have to calibrate the amount of capacity to what demand there actually will be. And as you said, you're sort of planning to bring this online. at the end of the decade. But like, I would say the error bars on how much HALU demand there is in 2030 or 2031, 2032, whatever, in the early years of this, the error bars seem pretty big. So I wonder how you think about that. Like, you're simultaneously building a kind of a step in a very stable supply chain with a lot of need because of the geopolitics of it. And then also building into this, like, speculative is the wrong word, but like very uncertain future.

Yeah, on the hila side, we are very, you know, very bullish on advanced reactors. We think that they're going to surprise everyone in their deployment speed and scale up. And, you know, just looking at the landscape of energy demand in the U.S., we haven't grown the grid for decades. And yet now we have this huge surge of demand for data centers to fuel AI compute. And so, you know, our view is to run those you want baseload, ultimately, the only clean, safe base. So it's been nuclear. It hasn't been the cheapest, but advanced reactors are giving us that option for factory build much lower cost reactor capacity, you know, energy production capacity. And so we think advanced reactors are going to surprise everyone on the upside. And so we're very bullish on HALU production. And so, you know, we're taking the long side of that bet. And, you know, we feel like someone needs to do it. And the whole reason that there hasn't been HALU capacity is because this has been the story all along. It's, hey, there's two sides of this market. It's chicken or the egg.

And as a producer, why should producers produce capacity for something that hasn't even been deployed and is a very tiny emerging market? And then the advanced reactors say, well, how can we actually operate and raise money to build our reactors and to have a future that's certain without fuel production? And we can't just produce our reactors and then wait five years to see fuel production come online. And so we're willing to lean into that and produce a lot of capacity. And so in Paduca, we're producing enough HALU enrichment capacity. We believe to take us through the middle of the next decade, potentially all the way to 2040 to serve U.S. demand. And the government obviously

has decided that this is strategically important as well. And so we should get to, I guess, Paduca and how you're building it and how you're financing it in part, which is, you're, you've got this huge DOE award, which is for LUU or HALU or both, actually. I should know that. So the DOE enrichment award that we received is for HALU capacity building. And so that's all going to go towards

putting HALU enrichment capacity in particular Kentucky. Right. So this is, I mean, in some ways to me, it's like exactly the type of thing that you want the government to do. Like if we believe we're going to need these advanced reactors

and there's this chicken or egg problem of like there's no fuel, at least in domestically or outside brush up for that matter. matter, then, yeah, great for the government to step in. So, okay, so you got this big DOE award to go build that. Like, just talk to me about what that, first of all, talk to me about the Paducaa site because it's interesting.

And then what's going to look like? What are you actually going to build there? Yeah, so Paduca is actually the last place the U.S. did commercial scale enrichment. It's where we did enrichment that fueled all the U.S. reactors, and that facility was shut down in 2013. And so the Paducah community, Paducah, Western Kentucky, the very western tip of Kentucky,

that community remembers when the enrichment plant was operating, and they're very comfortable with enrichment. They understand it. They're comfortable with nuclear. And so as we looked around for basically a year in over 10 other states, something like 1,000 different pieces of land, we found Paducaa to be the most supportive,

the most excited about bringing enrichment capacity back. So our site in Paduca is on the DOE site. That's the site where the enrichment was performed previously. It was called the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant. And we have about 100 acres at the south end of that site that we've leased for a long period of time that we will build our facility on. And so 100 acres, and again, building enough capacity there to satisfy HALU through the next decade. and then enough LEU capacity to displace adversarial imports into the U.S. And so that's the scale of it.

That's where we're doing it. Timeline is, you know, before end of decade. And then, yeah, that's the rationale on Wai Paducah. But it's an incredible location, incredibly supportive community, a ton of worker expertise there, everything you would basically want to run an enrichment facility, including power, as a former Manhattan Project. Are you subject, will you be subject to the commodity price of uranium or are you kind of insulated from that because it's tolling? In other words, like, you know, commodity prices of uranium go up, they go down, it's like any other commodity market, but you're providing a fixed service kind of in the middle of the supply chain there. So do you, are you long uranium effectively or are you totally indifferent to it? For LAU, we're certainly indifferent.

So the model on LU is almost entirely a tolling operation. And so utilities will purchase the U308 and then we'll enrich it. And so that enrichment price is independent of the U308 price. On HALU, as we're selling to advance reactor vendors, they often don't have fuel buying teams. So many of them are more inclined to purchase EUP, enrich uranium product, really that final product before going and making your final fuel form that you might want,

which in many cases is trisoparticles for advanced reactors. And so really on L-EU, it's very independent. On HALU, it's less independent, and in many cases we will be buying the U-308 and having it converted and enriching it and selling EUP when advanced reactors want us to do that. And so we're then interacting with the EU308 and you have conversion markets. We will price EUP in that case at a fair price that's based on those market prices.

So really our core business is in Richmond and we'll interact with and contract with utilities in whatever way makes sense for them. Yeah, though you alluded to something that you and I have chatted about before because you know we're investors in elemental power, which is a pure play nuclear development company. but what you alluded to that references that obliquely is just that on HALU, you're talking about what the reactor companies want, which is interesting. Like, that's a distinction, right? In LAU world with operating fleet of nuclear reactors, it's the utility.

It's the owner-operator of the plant who you're dealing with. That's the customer, who you're tolling for in that case. Whereas in HALU world and advanced reactor world, you know, generally speaking, a lot of that kind of like early-stage development activity, historically has been done by the reactor companies themselves, which I think is not the long-term state of that market, or it shouldn't be. It's not the long-term state of any other market in power generation, like where whoever the OEM is develops all the projects. So ultimately,

you're in an interesting spot there where today that's kind of who the customer base is, because that's who needs HALU to run test reactor demonstrations, things like that. But at some point, I presume, you're going to be switching from, you know, selling to the reactor vendor to selling to the developer IPP or to the utility ultimately. Right, that's right. I think this is a symptom of just the early stage of that market. And as reactor developers end up selling larger and larger numbers to utilities, and the utility becomes the owner-operator,

I think we're going to see that those same fuel buying teams working at the utilities, simply doing it the way that they have before, where they decouple these different steps, and they can contract separately with the right provider at each step. And so going back to your question, really as an enrichment services provider, that's our business. It's priced in dollars per swoo, and it's independent of the price of uranium or conversion services upstream of us. All right. Final question for you. One of my favorite questions to ask, if you could wave a magic wand and solve some problem in the nuclear supply chain that isn't the one you're currently solving, something other than enrichment capacity. in the U.S., what would you solve?

It's another way of asking the question, what do you view as the biggest bottleneck besides the one you're going to try to go tackle? Yeah, I think we already talked about conversion. I think as enrichment in the U.S. gets scaled up, you know, five to ten times. You're going to need more conversion capacity. I think people are working on that.

I think that will get solved. Then you look at the next bottleneck of U.S. mining. And if you look at, you know, ideally we have that in the U.S. too at scale at a scale that meets all of our needs. that would be really where I would wave the magic wand. Does the U.S. have as good of deposits as some other countries? No, it doesn't.

But today, for U.S. product to be mined, you know, it's shipped all the way out of the country to be converted in a lot of cases and then shipped all the way back. I think we should have a full domestic supply chain. And so, you know, you talk to U.S. mining companies and a lot of the challenges are just around things like mining permits. and how long that takes. And so I think if we can see rationalization of those processes,

especially given things are moving to ISR and are much more lower impact to the environment, I think if regulations can begin to reflect the reality of what mining is today and make that more streamlined and allow for US mining to come back, I think that'll be a great thing for the US supply chain, Because at that point, we'll have everything from mining to conversion, enrichment, deconversion and fuel fabrication all the way into U.S. reactors. And so that's how we get, you know, energy security on the nuclear supply chain for the U.S.

I do think it's really important. And I do think it gets back to just some of the processes around mining and permitting that have existed for decades now. Yeah. I don't know enough about this to be stating this definitively. But I think the other thing that's interesting about uranium mining versus other types of mining is that, you tend to see smaller mines. Like I heard some stat that we have like 13,000 abandoned uranium mines in the U.S. or something like that.

I think they're smaller from an individual mine perspective, but also you don't need to produce that much of the material, like compared to, I don't know, if you're mining copper or whatever. That doesn't help, though, because, you know, the permitting challenge of a small mine is not, like, it's not a linear relationship. It's not that much easier versus a large mine. You have to permit a lot of small mines.

It's actually a harder problem, I think, to solve. Yep, that's right. That's right. Yes. And so, I mean, some of that might be just linked back to the nature of the deposits in the U.S. and how large and high or percent they are. And so, you know, I do think it's solvable, though. And if I had to wave a magic wand, I would say,

let's make it easier for U.S. miners to compete with miners in other countries just so we can strengthen that domestic supply chain. Yep. All right, Scott, I look forward to visiting you in Paducah. Thank you. Once things are up and running there. But appreciate your time today. Thanks so much.

Yeah, excited to have you. Anytime you want to stop by, come visit, we're under construction now on the site, and so there's already a lot to see. Scott Nolan is the founder and CEO of General Matter. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to Latitude Media.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures.

This episode is produced by Max Savage Levinson, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.