The Private Company Bringing Nuclear Enrichment Back to America (Scott Nolan, CEO of General Matter)

Speaker A: If you think about all economic activity, any major strategic thing the US is trying to do or any country is trying to do, it ultimately gets back to energy. And we think that the way that energy is going to grow in the decades ahead is nuclear. It is the cleanest, safest form of baseload. It just hasn't been the cheapest. And so we want to make it the cheapest. The US is the first to develop enrichment during World War II, obviously. And during the Cold War, we were doing a tremendous amount of enrichment.

We were something like 86% of worldwide enrichment capacity. Now we're really in last place. And so we're trying to restore that on US soil this decade. The Biden administration set a goal of tripling nuclear by 2050. They made international commitments for that. And then Trump administration increased that to quadruple to 4x by 2050. And so this is a completely bipartisan thing that nuclear is going to grow 3 to 4x in the coming decades. So that now puts it at a $10 billion market in the US alone. China and Russia are now really the providers of something like 70% of new reactors built internationally, and that the US has lost a lot of influence over this area despite having great reactor designs.

We haven't been deploying them, we haven't been able to fuel them. And so Russia and China contracts often come in very long fuel relationships that we've been unable to compete with. So it was really this wake-up call for the industry of, hey, we need to move faster, we need to do things differently. Speaker B: Scott Nolan spent a year looking for an American nuclear enrichment company to invest in at Founders Fund. He could not find a single one. Concerned by America's dependence on adversaries like Russia, And certain that enrichment would only become more essential as demand for energy rises, Scott decided to found a company of his own, General Matter.