Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain

Latitude Media covering the new. The energy transition. I'm Shale Khan. I lead the early stage venture strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catal.

So for all the talk about a nuclear renaissance that maybe hopefully is coming in the US 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 mined uranium to fuel that goes into a nuclear reactor? Uh, that has been changing a little bit. People are talking about it more, uh, especially as folks start to wake up to the choke points that currently exist in that supply chain. and our reliance uh 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, enrichment, which, as you'll hear, is one of the areas where that risk is most acute. But Scott and I talked bigger picture as well. Everything from mining to fuel. That's coming up.

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All right, let's start by having you give me a walkthrough of the uh 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. Um I mean the the background is that every every reactor needs fuel. as as most people know. And we can talk about types of fuel, but 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. Um, you then enrich it, which is really a refining separation step. You then deconvert it into a solid, back into a solid. And with that solid you then make fuel, fuel fabrication. So fuel pellets or trisoparticles or whatever that is. So five steps total. Um the US does all of the steps. The US 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 the geopolitics, I guess, or at least the geography of it. W so as it stands today, what's a typical supply chain look like starting from mining through to ultimately usage in a in a reactor? Yeah. So with mining, um, US gets mined product from a bunch of sources, including from mines in the US. But Canada is a is a very large producer and Kazakhstan's a large producer.

And um Australia also has great deposits. But if you if you look at at today, it's really Kazakhstan, Canada are gonna drive it for the US. That's where we get most of the U three oh eight that we we consume. Um conversion is is also international. We have one facility doing conversion in the US. Um, that's Honeywell, uh sold under Converde. In southern Illinois, it's actually um Five miles from where our facility is.

So uh that's in Metropolis, Illinois. You also have conversion uh in Canada outside Toronto, uh done by Camico. And then you've got uh the Europeans who also do conversion. And so

Can we pause on that one for one second? That's uh you know, we're gonna 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 Al Solstice, advanced materials, operating in the US, as you said, in Illinois for what, like uh

fifty years or some crazy long period of time. Literally only one. It continues to operate. And I think they recently announced that they're expanding capacity by like 20% or something like that. But I mean, you know, you're obviously focused on like alleviating a supply chain bottleneck, as we will soon talk about. Um, how big a challenge do you think that one is? Yes. So I mean the whole history on the facility, like you said, you know, fifty fifty plus years.

of operations, originally a joint venture between General Atomic and Honeywell. Um and then it was it was always marketed under under Converdine, which was really the the sales arm of that joint venture. And then like you said, spun out under Solstice. So as uh you know

In the twenty tens as the 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, um, the conversion market had a tough time and that facility was actually mothballed. Um, and then it was brought back. And so it's been it's been getting ramped back up the last couple of years. I think that's what we're you're referring to is working all the way towards nameplate capacity and then potentially further. Um

And so so we've we've seen that facility expand uh production. They've had some great wins on that front the last couple of years. Um, but you know, I there's gonna be a limit to how far they can expand it at that site. And so, you know, enrichment's enrichment's really the main bottleneck in the industry, certainly in the domestic industry.

Conversion's 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. Um, but so the output of a conversion facility is what you purchase. How much?

Do you I mean, you know, if if if we don't expand conversion, let's say, in the US 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 US? Presumably you can go buy what a 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?

Uh, we d we're not too worried about it. So, you know, we've looked carefully at that market today. There's still spare capacity. Um, there's still a good amount of inventory in the market. And so we think that it can support a certain amount of US enrichment expansion, but at some point, um, you know, post like a doubling of US enrichment on US 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, um

uh nuclear energy institute. Uh 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 the utilities Uh, all converge on conversion being the next big bottleneck that that would have to be solved. In response to that, there's a few companies that have been talking about building conversion facilities. And conversion is a relatively known process. It's done without um a lot of technical difficulty in Europe.

Um, and in Canada and even in the US. And so um we expect that that'll that'll get done and and it'll be a bottleneck that's removed as the market needs it to be um within the next five years, five to ten years.

Okay, so so one way or another, somebody does conversion, you get UF6. Okay, so then now we could we go to enrichment, which is which is your focus. What is the what what happens in enrichment, first of all, and then we could talk about where it happens. Right. And so to go back to one thing you were saying, just the the chemistry of all this. So you mine product out of the ground. Uh it's really a mining and milling step. They're originally two separate steps.

back when you used, you know, traditional mining. Now most people are doing in- situate recovery ISR. And so that's more of, you know, like a a pumping and an 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. Um, that's what utilities bring us. So I think I think you said, hey, that's that's the material that you buy. Due to the way that the the fuel buying process works, in in most cases the utility actually buys it and brings it to us and we're doing a service to that to that pro product.

Which is super interesting. So the 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 uh you utilities generally purchase the uranium, they hold title in the uranium and then everything downstream of the mining step, the procurement of the U three oh eight is really an upgrade service.

to that uranium. And so everything downstream is basically a tolling operation as services, you know, per kilo or per some other unit operation. And so for our operation, It's something called separative 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 uh for reducing entropy or separating or refining. Um, you know, all these are essentially the same thing. And so what our operation does is we take in

uh you know, youth uh UF six. Um and if we're making LAU, it's traditionally gonna come in as natural UF six, which is uh 0.711% U two thirty five, the rest U two thirty eight. And what you do in enrichment is you enhance, you enrich the amount of that material that's U two thirty-five. That's the fissile material. That's what you need to make working uh uranium-based nuclear fuel. And uh that's what we're trying to enrich. And so through this process, you're essentially separating a gas.

And um you're separating it again and again until you have uh the the level of U two thirty-five that you want, which can be about five percent, three to five percent if you're doing low enriched uranium for a traditional reactor. Or it can be as high as nineteen point seven five percent for HALU, high SA, LEU for advanced reactors.

Yeah, I want to talk about that LU and Halu bit in just a moment, but just to contextualize for everybody, if you were if you were theoretically making weapons grade uranium, how much enrichment would you need to do? Um I well weapons grade is anything above twenty percent. And so the amount of Right. So you're your subweapons grade in any of these cases.

Yeah, and weapons grades consider above twenty percent. So how far you take it to you know, that's gonna what's gonna determine uh how much more enrichment you need to do. But it's essentially all enrichment is um, you know, a repeated process of refining until you get to the level that you're you're seeking.

Okay, so back to the supply chain then. So we we mine our uranium maybe in the US, but probably in Canada or in Kazakhstan. We convert it again, maybe in the US 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 this is what really put us onto this, onto this problem and and deciding, hey, we need to really start a company to address enrichment in the US was if you look at enrichment today and what the US consumes. About seventy five percent Europe, European pro producers, um, and it's about twenty five percent Russia. And so we can talk about the history of of how we got here, but there's no commercial at scale.

Uh US producer operating um anywhere. There is one facility in the US that's run by a European firm called Urenko. down in New Mexico. And that produces about twenty percent of US demand, but the other eighty percent is coming from overseas, and a full twenty, twenty five percent is Russia, depending on the Yeah, let's talk about let's talk about that Russia thing for just a minute. Has uh the the US industry's ability to purchase

Or toll, I guess, through Russian uh enrichment facilities. Has that changed over time as the US Russian relations have moved. Like I get the sense it's 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 we're sort of unwilling to sanction it or stop buying from Russia. Is that do I have that sorta right?

Well, in in twenty twenty four there was a Russian uranium imports ban passed by Congress. And so there's a waiver process um that's that's ongoing right now where the Secretary of Energy can waive uh the ban if a utility needs it and there's not another source, which has been the case. Um that waiver process expires January first, twenty twenty eight.

And so the setup today is, yes, it's still three quarters Europe, one quarter Russia. Um, most of that Russian uranium is coming in. It's all coming in under those waivers. Um, 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. Um, a lot of people have asked how 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 eighties, the US was the leader in global enrichment, something like eighty six percent at the peak. Um, and then the Berlin Wall fell and we entered a treaty with with Russia, which was called um the megatons to megawatts program.

And in that in that trade program, we imported Russian uh warheads. We downblended them and used used that downblended material to run our reactors. Um we then, you know, sent the depleted uranium back to Russia uh 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, um, using gas centrifuges while the US was still doing gaseous diffusion, which was a first generation technology.

And so then over the subsequent, you know, twenty years, the US progressively shut down its own enrichment, um, first privatizing it 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.

uh, which was again generation two technology, which was superior to the generation one gaseous diffusion that the US was using. And so we went from a place of eighty six percent global market share down to less than point one percent today by US companies or US entities. Um, and so uh that's the state of things. You know, from the utilities point of view, they they do need enriched uranium to to feed the reactors and we don't want

the grid to brownouts just due to not having fuel for them. And so they've um they've used the waiver process to bring in Russian uranium. And um, you know, now we're now we're facing the twenty twenty eight cliff. And so really it's how do we how do we fill this LU supply gap that's coming our way in twenty twenty eight um and 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, LEU and HALU and what that means for enrichment. But just to finish the The supply chain side of it, so you 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 that's the second to last step. You still have 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 uh combined with the fuel fabrication step. And so a lot of a lot of times those are referred to as uh the same step or at least priced as as the same step.

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Did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum. Proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices, delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energyhub.com. 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 four reactors, which generally run on Halo. Can you Just walk me through the difference between those two and both in general and then like what it means for 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. Um LEU is anywhere from three to five percent enriched of U two thirty five by weight. Halo is technically anywhere five to twenty percent. Um, but really it's it's typically gonna be fifteen to nineteen point seven five percent.

And the reason it's 19.75 is you want to keep some buffer against the 20% that really triggers uh weapons grade classification and a whole bunch of international standards. Um and so the reason that there's two different levels, uh, if we go back, you know, to the underlying tech. Y the traditional reactors that you have that are gigawatt scale and are very large, um, you know, those have a large core. And so uh they don't need a lot of enrichment to get fuel to go critical.

Um, you have a larger amount of fuel in there and it can it can burn for a longer period of time with still uh pretty good efficiency. And so that's traditionally been done to three to five percent. As we look to uh factory build reactors and make them smaller, the core has to get smaller. And so to get get criticality, to get good burn up and refueling cycles that work for SMRs.

Um, you end up g wanting to go higher and people have chosen to go in some cases 15, 16%. Uh, 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. Um, you know, we're making both of those. And let's be clear on what we talked about with the existing supply chain. I mean basically everything we're talking about, the existing supply chain is L. That's right.

Partially because there aren't those advanced reactors don't mostly exist yet, or at least they're not commercial in the market. Halu, there is uh zero current capacity or ba essentially zero. I mean, walk me through like if I wanted to go buy Halu tomorrow, what would that look like? Uh, you would have to purchase her from Russia. And so that's what actually triggered me looking into this space. So if we rewind to like late twenty twenty two, um

at Founders Fund I wasn't, you know, looking at all the advanced reactors companies, deciding to invest in one. Um, I asked them what the hardest thing about building their company was going to be and it was purchasing fuel. It was obtaining Halo. 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 why don't you just get the US companies to to make Halo? Is it that much harder to go to a higher level? And they said, There there really is no US owned production. Um, and so that kicked this all off. And I I realized pretty quickly that

un that Russia was the only source and unless there was a new source that came online very soon, really by end of decade, um, all the advanced reactor companies would 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 avail available to advanced reactors. Um but that's that's really only gonna take them through first

demonstrations first deployments to really scale up will need a new supply. And so um you have Europe saying that they're going to bring capability online in Europe um in the early 2030s. And then uh the other two companies saying that they're uh, you know, who are planning to produce Halo is uh us at our facility in Paducah, Kentucky. And so we'll bring we'll be bringing that online by the end of the decade.

And then uh Centrist, the US um incumbent, uh, has also been working on Halo capacity and and and planning to scale that up.

So for you, I mean, I I think you can imagine uh to a first order that okay, if you're if you're gonna do enrichment and you're gonna make LEU and then you just need to go further, enrich more to get to Halo. 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 and it is kind of a different process, or at least you want different equipment if you're gonna be producing LEU versus Halo. So it's High level, can you just walk through like are those the same process run at different frequencies or for different lengths, or is it it actually a different process?

Um, I think the the thing to remember is this is all really just a separation distillation process. And so Producing Halu, you typically in in ingest LEU and then you'll enrich that up to HALU. And so it's it's really a repeated process. Now, the things that are different, the important things that are different are um around criticality.

And licensing. And, you know, the licensing is different to reflect the the criticality difference and and some a few other differences. Um, but fundamentally the process does not have to change from a physics standpoint. Um what does have to change is Things like you mentioned. Um, things that hold uranium, um, a certain volume of uranium may need to be smaller in the case of HELU 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 primary difference between the two is is criticality considerations, which is Which is why you see um, you know, in the past couple of years the DOE putting out awards for uh Hilo enrichment specifically. Um, and LEU enrichment capability and then also Halo deconversion. And so that last step that you asked about, those last two steps of deconversion and fuel fabrication.

As you bring uh HALU UF6 down into solid form, uh, you're now getting even more density of of uranium. And so as it's at a HALU level, um, you know, up to nineteen point seven five percent U two thirty five 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 and equipment. I'm interested from like a business and market perspective. It feels like LEU and Halu are in such different places, right? LEU, you've got this like,

firm, stable demand of the existing reactor fleet that is operating. And it could grow because we're gonna build some new reactors over time, but you know, from a a large base. So incrementally it's not gonna be that much. So you kind of know how much Halo dem or sorry, how much LU demand. There is right now. And so you could come in and just like supplant part of the existing supply chain there, hopefully the twenty five percent that we get from Russia.

Whereas Halo, it's starting from essentially zero. And it's also kind of a chicken or egg question with a bunch of re 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 gonna scale up at. And so you're gonna produce

capacity to make Halo 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 Halo 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 s a kind of a 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 healer 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 and scale up. And, you know, just looking at the the landscape of energy demand in the US, um, we haven't grown the grid for decades. Um and yet now we have this huge surge of demand for data centers to fuel AI compute. And so You know, our view is a little bit more than a little bit.

To to run those you want baseload. Ultimately, the only clean safe base load's been nuclear. It hasn't been the cheapest, but advanced reactors are giving us that option for factory built, much lower cost reactor cap you know, energy production capacity. And so we think advanced reactors are are going to surprise everyone on the upside. And so we're very bullish on Halo production. And so, you know, we're taking the long side of that bet.

Um, and you know, I we feel like someone needs to do it. And and the whole reason that there hasn't been halo capacity is because this has been the story all along. Um, it's hey, there's two sides to 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 to build our reactors?

and to have a future that's that's certain without fuel production. And we can't just, you know, produce our reactors and then wait five years to see fuel production come online. And so we're we're willing to lean into that and and produce a lot of capacity. And so in in Paducah, we're producing enough Halo enrichment capacity, we believe, to take us through the middle of the next decade, potentially all the way to twenty forty to serve US demand.

And the uh the government obviously has decided that this is strategically important as well. And so we should we should get to, I guess, Paducah and how you're building it and how you're financing it in part, which is um you've got this huge DOE Award, which is for LU 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 gonna go towards putting Halo cap you know, Halo enrichment capacity in Paducah, 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 gonna need these advanced reactors and there's this chicken or egg problem of like there's no fuel, at least in domestically or outside Russia for that matter.

Um, then yeah, like great for the government to step in. So okay, so you got this big DOE award to to go build that. Like just talk to me about what that first of all, talk to me about the Paducah site because it's interesting. Um, and then what are you ac what's it gonna look like? What are you actually gonna build there? Yeah. So Paduca is actually the last place the US did commercial scale enrichment. Um it's where we did enrichment that fueled all the US reactors.

And that facility was was shut down in twenty thirteen. And so the Paducah community, uh 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. Um, and so as we looked around for basically a year in over ten other states, something like a thousand

different pieces of land. Um, we found Paducah to be the most supportive, the most excited about bringing enrichment capacity back. So our site in Paducah 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 a hundred acres at the south end of that site that we've leased. Um

for a long period of time that we will build our facility on. And so a hundred acres and aga and you know again building enough capacity there to satisfy Halu through the next decade. And then enough LU capacity to displace um adversarial imports into the US. And so that's the scale of it. That's where we're doing it. Timeline is, you know, before end of decade.

Um, and then and then yeah, that's the rationale on why Paducah, but it's an incredible, incredible location, incredibly supportive community, a ton of worker expertise there, everything you would basically want. to run an enrichment facility, including power, um, as a former Manhattan Project site.

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. Um, 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? Uh for for LEU we're certainly indifferent. So the the model on LEU 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, um, as we're selling to advanced reactor vendors, they often don't have fuel buying teams. So many of them are more inclined.

to purchase EUP enriched 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. Um and so Really on on LEU it's very independent. On Halo, it's less independent. And in many cases, we'll be buying the U308.

and uh 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 U308 and UF, you know, conversion markets. Um We will price EUP in that case at a fair price that's based on those market prices. So really our core business is is enrichment and we'll interact with um 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 we're investors in elemental power, which is a pure play nuclear development company. But what you alluded to that that references that obliquely is just that on HALU, you're talking about what the new the reactor companies want, which is interesting. Like that's a distinction, right? In in LEU 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 uh Halo world and advanced reactor world, You know, generally speaking, a lot of the 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 like you're 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 gonna 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 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 the owner operator. Um, I think we're gonna see that, you know, those same fuel buying teams working at the utilities simply doing it the way that they they have before, where they 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, you know, enrichment services provider.

That's our business. It's priced in dollars per swoo and it's independent of of the price of uranium or um conversion services upstream of us.

All right. Final question for you. One of my favorite questions to ask. If you could um 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, so something other than enrichment capacity in the US. What would you solve? It's another way of asking the question, like what do you view as the biggest bottleneck besides the one you're gonna try to go tackle?

I think we already talked about conversion. I think I think as enrichment in the US gets scaled up. you know, five to ten times. You're gonna need more conversion capacity. I think people are working on that. I think that will get solved. Then you look at the next bottleneck um of US mining.

And if you look at, you know, ideally we have that in the US too at scale, at a scale that meets all of our needs. Um that would be that would be really where I would wave the magic wand. Um, you know, does the US have as good of deposits as some other countries? No, it doesn't. Um, but today for US product to be mined, you know, it's shipped all the way out of the country to be converted in in a lot of cases and then shipped all the way back. I think we should have a full domestic supply chain.

And so, um, you know, you talk to US mining companies and and a lot of the challenges are just around things like mining permits and uh how long that takes. And so I think if we can see uh rationalization of those processes, especially given, you know, things are moving to ISR. uh and are much more uh you know lower impact to the environment. I think if if regulations can begin to reflect the reality of what mining is today.

uh and 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 US reactors.

And so that's how we get, you know, energy security on the nuclear supply chain for the US. I think it I do think it's really important. I d and I do think it gets back to Just some of the processes around mining and permitting that have existed for decades now. Yeah. The I I I don't know enough about this to be stating this definitively, but I think the th 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 thirteen thousand abandoned uranium mines in the US or something like that. Um I think they're smaller from an individual mine perspective. Um, but also you're 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. Um

That doesn't help though, because you know, the permitting challenge of a small mind is is not like the it's not a a linear relationship. It's not that much easier versus a a large mind. So you have to permit a lot of small minds. It's actually a harder problem, I think, to solve. Mm. Yep. That's right. That's right. Um Yes. And so I I I mean some of that might be just linked back to the nature of the deposits in the US and and how large and and you know, high or percent they are.

And so, um, you know, I d I do think it's solvable though. And I if I had to wave a magic wand, I would say, let's make it easier for US miners to compete with uh miners in other countries just so we can strengthen that domestic supply chain. Now, All right, Scott. I look forward to visiting you in Paducah. Once uh 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, uh 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 latitudemedia.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.