A lease to build the first U.S.-owned, privately developed uranium enrichment facility in the country was signed in western Kentucky on Tuesday against a backdrop of containers holding depleted tails of uranium hexafluoride – some covered in rust.

General Matter, the California-based company with ties to billionaire and Trump ally Peter Thiel, plans to build a proposed $1.5 billion facility on the 100-acre parcel leased from the U.S. Department of Energy on the site of the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in McCracken County. That site, shuttered in 2013, was built by the federal government in the 1950s to boost national defense efforts – and later generated fuel for nuclear power plants.

Attendees bussed to the site Tuesday morning heard from General Matter CEO Scott Nolan, DOE of

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