Skip to content
FusionBenchmark
General Matter — image published by the organisation
Picture published by General Mattersource ↗
General Matter

General Matter

🇺🇸 US · Founded 2024 · Active

General Matter is a US company developing uranium enrichment, the step in making nuclear fuel that raises the share of the fissile isotope uranium-235 above its natural 0.711%. It aims to produce low-enriched uranium (3 to 5% uranium-235) for today's reactors and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU, 5 to 20%), which many advanced reactor and microreactor designs need. The company says the US relies on foreign suppliers for almost all its nuclear fuel and that it is developing lower-cost enrichment technology to close that gap. Its website does not describe the technology or a plant site in detail.

Website ↗X ↗
Sector
Fuel cycle
Fuel
High-assay low-enriched uranium, Low-enriched uranium
Role
Supplier

Terms

High-assay low-enriched uranium
High-assay low-enriched uranium: uranium enriched to between 5% and just under 20% uranium-235, as the US Department of Energy defines it. It is still formally low-enriched, because the international line for highly enriched uranium is 20%, which is why many designs specify 19.75%. The binding supply constraint for many advanced reactor designs. The 5 to 10% part, which carries lighter US physical-security requirements than material from 10% up, is also tagged as LEU+. A developer calling fuel in that band 'LEU' is making a labelling choice, not describing a different enrichment.
Low-enriched uranium
Uranium enriched to 5% uranium-235 or less, typically 3 to 5%: the range almost all power reactors use. Formally, anything below 20% is low-enriched; this site holds the band from 5% to just under 20% separately as HALEU, with its 5 to 10% part also tagged as LEU+. A fuel above 5% uranium-235 belongs in one of those, never here, whatever a developer's own materials call it.

Related companies

Sources