00:00:43 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:00:43] S1: Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Scott Nolan. He is the cofounder and CEO of General Matter. Scott, I think today, supplies roughly 25% of all the enriched uranium to The US. And I wanna know what would happen if Russia decided to just stop supplying The US tomorrow. [00:01:00] S0: If Russia stops shipments of uranium to The US tomorrow, utilities would start eating into their inventories. We continue importing from Europe, but soon we would have to figure out how to replace that. We would probably talk to the European suppliers about purchasing more. Maybe there would be a lot of pressure to start even thinking about purchasing from China, who's one of the major producers. And that would be the solution. We'd be buying more probably from Europe, and then maybe Europe's buying more from China, and then maybe China's buying more from Russia. So we'd be kind of bringing in through that channel. And at some point, maybe it would be too hard to purchase, or prices would go up a lot, and utility prices would go up a lot. And maybe there'd be occasional brownouts. So I think it would be a scenario where you truly have a shortage of about 20, 25% of uranium supply onto the grid, and we would we would be scrambling to figure out where that's gonna come from. And probably for some period of time, rates would go up a lot. [00:02:00] S1: And uranium isn't really like an elastic supply. Right?
00:02:00 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:02:00] S1: And uranium isn't really like an elastic supply. Right? [00:02:03] S0: It's... You know, there's a lag time on it, which is why people carry inventory. But the whole supply chain of enriched uranium, if you go end to end, is really... You start with mining. And so mining, ramping up mining, has has major lag time on it. Then you convert it into a gas. Those facilities exist. They're not that flexible. They're basically at capacity right now. And then enrichment is this other other capacity piece where you need a large factory running enrichment equipment, enriching and depleting uranium at the same time, and then you're turning that into fuel. So there's a lot of fixed capacity in the supply chain. It's not something that's easily just ramped up overnight. So I think it would be a race against time to to actually bring new capacity online, whether that's inside The US, in European allies, with a fallback plan of finding someone who can make it, and at some point, that becomes China. And maybe I should add. The the the the reason I think you're asking this question is because in 2028, that becomes reality under current law. [00:03:06] S1: So What do you mean by that?
00:03:06 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:03:06] S1: So What do you mean by that? [00:03:07] S0: Congress passed, you know, a law banning the import of Russian uranium starting on 01/01/2028. And, we're we're under a waiver process where utilities can say, I don't have a good source of this uranium, this enriched uranium, or this fuel other than Russia. And so we do need to import this to make sure that we can keep the lights on. And so that's the waiver process that's going on now. On 01/01/2028, that path, that waiver process actually expires. And so as as written in [00:03:39] S1: the law today, that that is the the deadline. Would you expect The US to kinda change their stance ahead of that to basically make sure that that doesn't just immediately get turned off overnight?
00:03:39 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:03:39] S1: the law today, that that is the the deadline. Would you expect The US to kinda change their stance ahead of that to basically make sure that that doesn't just immediately get turned off overnight? [00:03:48] S0: I mean, this is why what... We're doing what we're doing. So the the Russia bit... The Russia uranium ban was a bipartisan act, extremely, extremely supported in congress, very consensus. I don't think it's something that The US wants to back down on. And so the reason we started as as a company was to address the supply chain issues that The US is facing from low enriched uranium that powers today's grid, which is 18.6 to 19% nuclear, The advanced fuel that all advanced reactors need called HALEU, high assay, low enriched uranium, that we can't get at all today. So every advanced reactor company that you've heard of is is looking for this fuel and trying to find a long term supply. And so it's this this inability to expand the grid, to expand nuclear because we don't have the missing piece of enrichment is why we're doing what we're doing. So... And and, you know, whether Russia's in the market or not, this is a major issue that we're trying to address.
00:03:48 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
[00:03:48] S0: I mean, this is why what... We're doing what we're doing. So the the Russia bit... The Russia uranium ban was a bipartisan act, extremely, extremely supported in congress, very consensus. I don't think it's something that The US wants to back down on. And so the reason we started as as a company was to address the supply chain issues that The US is facing from low enriched uranium that powers today's grid, which is 18.6 to 19% nuclear, The advanced fuel that all advanced reactors need called HALEU, high assay, low enriched uranium, that we can't get at all today. So every advanced reactor company that you've heard of is is looking for this fuel and trying to find a long term supply. And so it's this this inability to expand the grid, to expand nuclear because we don't have the missing piece of enrichment is why we're doing what we're doing. So... And and, you know, whether Russia's in the market or not, this is a major issue that we're trying to address. [00:04:46] S1: I'd love to talk about the history of uranium enrichment. I think back in the, like, early two thousands, space and actually getting astronauts to orbit was one of the last things that, like, Russia was only able to do, and The US didn't really... Like, we were shutting down our shuttle program, and then SpaceX came in, and now that's kinda flipped. How did, like, the world kind of unfold where Russia is actually supplying us with this very critical material?
00:05:11 · Scott Nolan
[00:05:11] S0: It's an interesting history. So The US was first to do enrichment. We did it during the Manhattan Project. We did it for nuclear weapons to win World War II. And that was done using a process called gaseous diffusion. It was a first generation technology. The US did it at scale, did it across a few sites, Oak Ridge, Tennessee Paducah, Kentucky Portsmouth, Ohio, three places that we did enrichment for decades. And that enrichment was it was used for weapons originally, but very quickly then used for nuclear power. And so The US was a leader in enrichment. We were doing it 5% to 90% of worldwide enrichment was the using this gaseous diffusion process. That was something we thought was really important during the Cold War to have our own supply chain. Later, after The US got this capacity online, Europe came up with their own enrichment. Russia came up with their own enrichment capacity. These were with a second generation technology, the gas centrifuge. And so these two paths kind of diverged. The US kept doing gaseous diffusion. Europe and Russia did centrifuge. The US kept it going until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And at that point, The US said, hey, we're clearly now in a free trade world. We don't need to do this gaseous diffusion process anymore. The process that Europe and Russia went with is more efficient. We can trade for this. This is an economic decision. It's not a national security decision as much. We have a huge stockpile. We have plenty of weapons. We do not need more of that. Let's focus on nuclear energy. And for nuclear energy, we don't really need to have our own enrichment capacity. This old process is a lot more expensive. It's more energy intensive. Let's work with our our foreign allies to to trade. And so over the next few decades post the Berlin Wall, The US progressively shut down its gaseous diffusion capacity to the point of in 2013, it shut down the last plant that was owned and operated by The US in Paducah, Kentucky. And we said, we'll keep trading. And so over the last decade, it's become more obvious that that probably wasn't the right approach.