PADUCAH, KY – From 2001 to 2010, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was the only nuclear enrichment plant in the United States. Back then, it was operated by the United States Enrichment Corporation, which filed for bankruptcy in 2013. The plant shut down.

On my way into the plant on August 5, 2025, after taking a bus down a two-lane road, I saw the green sign, surrounded by overgrown grass and sagging telephone wires, reading “US DEPT. OF ENERGY GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT.”

Paducah is a small town in western Kentucky on the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers. Settled in 1815 and originally named “Pekin,” William Clark—of Lewis and Clark—developed the city and christened the city Paducah in 1827. The city was mapped out by the same men who tackled the American frontier.

The sign was due for an update. Over two hundred engineers, politicos, venture capitalists, and energy industry leaders made the journey from California, DC, and New York to Kentucky because a new start-up was leasing land on the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion site to build its own enrichment facility. On the bus ride to the plant, chemists rubbed shoulders with sixth-generation Paducahans, both there to celebrate the plant’s new operator: General Matter.

Invented in Los Alamos by the Manhattan Project team, gaseous diffusion—as practiced in the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant—was the first generation process of refining nuclear material into nuclear fuel, first used for weapons then for nuclear energy. At the peak of the Cold War, during the fifties through the seventies, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was producing enough enriched uranium for nearly a hundred reactors

After the fall of the USSR, the Clinton administration ushered in a new age of globalization. Free trade with Russia, which produces a quarter of our enriched uranium, and Europe, which produces the other seventy-five percent, was supposed to fill in the gaps in the American energy sector long after our Cold War-era stockpiles ran dry.

Now, the United States cannot currently produce its own nuclear fuel. General Matter, starting with its Paducah facility, is reshoring nuclear enrichment.

General Matter was founded in 2023. Scott Nolan, the founder and CEO of General Matter, told his audience at the lease signing: “This plant led the US in commercial enrichment for energy, for grid energy, until 2013 and it is this plant that was first selected as a site and then built in less than one year in 1952. That is the reason Paducah is called Atomic City. During that time, the entire Cold War, the US led the world in enrichment. The peak was 90% of worldwide enrichment capacity was done here in the US. Today, it’s less than 1%. And so we shut down that capacity, we buried it. But today we’re going to reverse that. We’re going to start a rebirth of enrichment in the US, here in Paducah, here on this land behind us.”

A little over a century after William Clark established the city of Paducah, in 1943, the U.S. War Department established the Kentucky Ordnance Works (KOW) in the same town, one of the largest American TNT plants of World War II, employing 6,000 men during construction. When the war ended and the munitions plant shut down, the facility was repurposed to produce Uranium-235 (U-235), a critical material for the Cold War’s nuclear stockpiles. It did so through the process of nuclear enrichment—in other words, making raw nuclear material into fuel.

Alben Barkley, the Vice President under Harry Truman, was a Paducah native. He supported the placement of the Kentucky Ordinance Works site during his tenure as a Kentucky senator and, as Vice President, successfully fought for the Paducah site to be turned into an enrichment facility, one of three in the United States.

Construction started on January 2, 1951 and over the next two years just under 30,000 workers turned the KOW facility into a nuclear diffusion site. By November 1952, Paducah produced enriched uranium. The facility was completed in 1954. Fifty-nine years after the plant’s completion, the New York Times, in its 2013 article covering the plant’s shutdown, referred to it as a mere “cold war relic.”

During World War II, the TNT munitions plant in Paducah that powered the United States was publicly owned, but privately operated by the Atlas Powder Company, a subsidiary of DuPont. As the munitions plant was transformed into a nuclear enrichment plant, the same structure continued: The government owned the land facilities, and the technology, but it was operated by a series of contractors. Ownership shuffled between the U.S. Army, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the Department of Energy, while management shuffled from Union Carbide’s Nuclear Division to Martin Marietta Energy Systems to the United States Enrichment Corporation, created by the Energy Policy Act of 1992. In 1998, the USEC was privatized via an IPO. Once again, Paducah’s operator was a profit-seeking company while the facilities remained in federal hands. But, in 2013, USEC shut the plant down.The abandoned plant, taken over by swarms of environmental regulators and clean-up crews, lay dormant. 

“We made the decision that we should just stop and trade for it [enriched uranium]. That was the path that got us from over 90% of global enrichment to less than 0.1% today,” Scott Nolan, the founder and CEO of General Matter, told Arena. “This is a couple years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There's this thinking in the 90s that we're making this move towards free markets, globalization. Get things where they're the cheapest, specialize as much as possible, offshore. Enrichment was part of that. And so that decision resulted in, sequentially, the US’s plants being shut down with Paducah the last one and Piketon, Ohio before that and then Oak Ridge before that.”

In October 2024, General Matter, then a small, unheard of company with a few dozen employees came out of stealth when the Biden Administration’s Department of Energy tapped the start-up as one of four companies to win a $2.7 billion bid to reshore uranium enrichment. 

General Matter at that point was officially less than a year old. Formally incorporated in January 2024 (though the founding team was assembled in 2023), General Matter was off to the races. When I asked Nolan about this quick timeframe, he shrugged it off. “It feels like we haven’t been around for very long, but it’s been more than two and a half years working on this. And so, that’s longer than it took them to actually select the site in Paducah and build the site in Paducah,” referring to the rapid pace at which the plant was built and produced enriched uranium in the early 1950s. 

Before the Paducah site was announced and the lease signed earlier this month, Nolan had teased opening sites in Texas, Washington, Utah, or Wyoming. “Those states are the place where we would do our Starbase-equivalent. But before doing that, the Paducah site is absolutely the best place for us to start. We needed sufficient area, we needed power, we needed a nearby workforce, but the one that we needed the most of all, was actually just a supportive community.” Laughing, Scott admitted that “in hindsight it was probably incredibly obvious that we should have simply gone to the community that most recently did enrichment and that would have been the shortcut, but we did it the brute force way and got to the same answer.”

General Matter’s lease was signed and the ground formally broken that August morning. Construction is set to begin early next year with plans to open the plant by 2030. That Tuesday afternoon, attendees both local and coastal celebrated at the National Quilt Museum in downtown Paducah. As attendees ate barbeque and drank sweet tea, community leaders spoke about their gratitude to General Matter for revitalizing Atomic City and their excitement at unleashing a new frontier of energy independence. A few hundred feet away from the celebration was a sculpture of Lewis and Clark ‘On the Trail of Discovery,’ charting out the American frontier.

A year before the Paducah plant shut down in 2013, the Department of Energy produced a sitcom-length video about the history of the Paducah plant. It went through the history of the plant, the flourishing community of the plant—”a small town in itself” as well as the threats to the plant’s operations. The video ends with the refrain that, “As in all wars, the cost of freedom is never cheap.” In the video’s context, that was talking about the negative externalities of the gaseous diffusion plant, the environmental hazards, radiation, and other byproducts of the Cold War arms race with Russia. But, then, global competition for energy has “helped keep America at the forefront of the world’s powers,” as the video put it. A more literal reading of the refrain, the cost of freedom, is about $50 million, the cost of Founders Fund’s investment into General Matter. Or maybe a more accurate counting would be $1.5 billion, the amount that the Paducah project is estimated to cost.

The refrain has a new meaning when considering that currently, the United States relies on Russia for a quarter of its enriched uranium. Freedom—energy independence—has a high cost. But it’s a cost that we ought to be willing to pay.

The sentiment seems to be spreading. In Paducah that Tuesday morning, Kentucky’s two Republican senators, Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell, spoke alongside their state’s Democratic Governor, Andy Beshear, about the need to bring nuclear enrichment stateside. Beshear, a Democratic favorite for the 2028 nomination, even went so far as to praise President Trump for expanding American nuclear production. 

Scott Nolan does not want General Matter to be dependent on government handouts for business. That’s why the Paducah plant shut down—economic nonviability. “At the end of the day we need to be commercially competitive with our foreign competitors who are commercial. My mentality on this is that if we want to have robust onshoring or reshoring of [nuclear enrichment] capability, that capability needs to be able to compete and stand on its own two feet and not just be neck-and-neck with foreign competition, but actually lead foreign competition.”

“Energy production is upstream of compute. It’s upstream of manufacturing. It’s upstream of all economic growth. So if you think we are in competition on the AI front, on the military front, on the economic influence front, you can't lose any of those battles. And so you need energy to underpin it. I think this existential push is going to unite everyone, and already has. I think that’s why you see people from all over the political spectrum supporting the same project of bringing back domestic capability.”

Photographs courtesy of General Matter