US uranium enrichment market share dropped from 86% to under 0.1%
Scott Nolan · Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain · Apr 2, 2026 · at 16:27
General Matter CEO Scott Nolan traces the historical collapse of domestic US enrichment capabilities following the end of the Cold War.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so we went from a place of 86% global market share down to less than .1% today by U.S. Companies or U.S. Entities.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Scott Nolan
Nolan: Advanced reactors will surprise on deployment speed for AI demand
“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 cent…”
Nolan: General Matter will displace adversarial nuclear imports by 2030
“Building enough capacity there to satisfy HALU through the next decade, and then enough LEU capacity to displace 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.”
Nolan: US has no commercial-scale domestic enrichers, relies on Europe and Russia
“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 at scale U.S. Producer operating anywhere. There…”
Nolan: General Matter's Paducah plant will cover US HALEU demand through 2040
“In, in Paducah, we're producing enough HALU enrichment capacity, we believe, to take us through the middle of the next decade, potentially all the way to twenty-forty to serve U.S. Demand.”
Nolan: US waiver process for Russian uranium imports expires January 1, 2028
“Well, in, in twenty-twenty-four, 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 h…”