General Matter
By 
Back when I was awarding contracts for environmental restoration, there would be some bidders who had nothing to do with environmental restoration. Their plan was to “team with” or subcontract to an organization that knew what they were doing. I never let a contract to them.
Now comes General Matter. That’s the kind of name that too-smart Silicon Valley types might condescend to a process that deals with atoms, not qbits. Uranium enrichment is one of those messy physical processes, so why not.
I first heard the name back in the spring and looked at the website, which was a placeholder only. IIRC, one page with the name and some promise that more was coming.
They have more now, but not much more, although it’s fancied up with the latest website tricks. The technical parts read like a bro hurriedly found some stuff about the topics online and tried to rephrase it without knowing anything about it.
They present themselves as a uranium enrichment firm, but they don’t say what their process is. WKMS, in Kentucky, says that they have been in talks to develop an enrichment facility at the site of the former Paducah Gaseous Enrichment Plant.
In an email sent to WKMS, General Matter said that the company intends to make a “historic investment in American nuclear infrastructure” by restoring a shuttered facility in Paducah. The gaseous diffusion plant in McCracken County, which ceased operations in 2013, was built by the U.S. government in the 1950s to bolster national defense efforts – and later to generate fuel for nuclear power plants.
“Seventy-five years ago, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission selected Paducah to help lead the nation’s original enrichment efforts,” the email reads. “We are proud to return to and rebuild this historic site to power a new era of American energy independence.”
This sounds like they are planning to restore the gaseous diffusion plant, but, like other gaseous diffusion plants, Paducah is being disassembled and the site remediated. And nobody is going to build one of those again.
General Matter has entwined Los Alamos, Sandia, and Oak Ridge national laboratories on its “Our Team” page, which gives them access to some expertise in uranium enrichment. Oh, and Peter Thiel and Palantir are part of it too.
It may be just me, but I would be very careful of a company that has never done such things and doesn’t say how it plans to enrich uranium.
At the former Piketon, Ohio, gaseous diffusion plant, Centrus has built a plant using the very tall American centrifuges to enrich uranium. They have actually delivered enriched uranium. In North Carolina, the Australian-Canadian firm Global Laser Enrichment is testing the SILEX process for enrichment of uranium. General Matter’s approach is centrifuges? Lasers? Software?
General Matter has no track record they’ve made public. The CEO is from SpaceX.
A formal announcement event is planned for Aug. 5 in Paducah. According to General Matter’s email, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, U.S. Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul and Congressman James Comer are all expected to be on hand, along with members of the nuclear industry and local officials.
Good luck, Kentucky!
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner