How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor

1. 0:00 – 0:57

   Cold Open

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

      Welcome to Ward 250, first advanced reactor to ever make power by a startup.

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor0:07

      We did something pretty awesome today, the first-ever AI chip powered by a nuclear reactor.

   3. SPSpeaker0:12

      First TRISO reactor to turn on in over 50 years in the United States.

   4. SGSarah Guo0:15

      How much of the premise of Valor as possible now comes from increasing demands for power in the United States, largely driven by AI compute?

   5. ITIsaiah Taylor0:26

      Energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price. If you can figure out how to make energy cheaper, you will have demand. When SpaceX started going, people were like, "There's no way they're gonna hit the numbers that they're hitting today." Most of the nuclear industry is a modeling and simulation industry. They're not focused on hardware iteration, hardware execution, building the simplest and safest reactor that allows them to scale, and Valor just demonstrated that we are.

   6. SGSarah Guo0:51

      [upbeat music] Hi, listeners. Welcome

2. 0:57 – 1:30

   Isaiah Taylor Introduction

   1. SGSarah Guo0:57

      back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Isaiah Taylor, the founder and CEO of Valor Atomics. We're here in their Utah nuclear facility, where we're gonna do a tour, talk about why speed and scale are the only path to making nuclear reactors in the United States again, um, why energy is the only input to our hyper-techno industrial future, and why there's an open regulatory environment for progress in energy R&D for the first time in years. Welcome. Isaiah, thanks so much for doing this.

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor1:25

      Of course. Welcome to Valor Atomics at San Rafael. Thanks for coming.

   3. SGSarah Guo1:29

      So what is-- what

3. 1:30 – 4:24

   Valar’s Mission and Origin

   1. SGSarah Guo1:30

      are you doing here at Valor?

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor1:31

      We are making nuclear reactors built for planetary scale. So nuclear fission is kind of an old technology. It's around the 1940s that we really started working on it. Um, and we've built a lot of nuclear reactors, but we've never built them for mass scale. Nuclear's never had its Ford moment or its Tesla moment, if you wanna put it that way, and that's what Valor Atomics is working on doing. We have nuclear reactors that are more manufactured than constructed, and, uh, they're extremely safe, and we think the combination of these two things is going to allow us to scale nuclear fission and make energy ten times cheaper for humanity, so that's what we're working on.

   3. SGSarah Guo2:06

      We're gonna dig into why you think this is possible and why you're making it happen after decades of, like, no real activity-

   4. ITIsaiah Taylor2:11

      Yeah

   5. SGSarah Guo2:11

      ... in this space. But first, for you personally, um, you don't have the, you know, credentialed decades of nuclear research background-

   6. ITIsaiah Taylor2:21

      Yep

   7. SGSarah Guo2:21

      ... that is often required to work in this space. Like, you know, why you and what triggered it?

   8. ITIsaiah Taylor2:26

      I have been, uh, reluctant to start this company for a long time, um, and eventually did out of sheer frustration that, uh, nobody else was, was working on it with the pace required and understanding the scale that would be required. Um, and, uh, you know, I think any problem that, uh, you want to work on that's, that's as hard as this, you have to really, really believe in it, and after a certain amount of time, I just realized that I was never gonna stop thinking about this, and so I s-- I might as well build it. It, it started for me, my great-grandfather was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. Um, my great-grandfather and great-grandmother were both in the secret city, um, during, uh, World War II, and I just grew up thinking about nuclear as this incredible technology. I've, I've always wanted to build thousands of machines. Um, I didn't know which ones I was gonna build. It was just very clear to me since I was, like, six that I was supposed to build thousands of machines. Um, and at some point, um, I, I went from thinking about nuclear as, like, a totally solved problem, right? Which was my first, um, you know, outside view of the industry. It was like, okay, people know how to build reactors. They're doing fine at it, to suddenly realizing that this was an entirely unsolved problem, um, that we, we sort of thought we solved in the '60s, and there was, like, a good run into the '70s, and then we suddenly stopped. So I came to that realization. It was, uh, very disorienting for me, actually. I, I suddenly realized it. I actually remember the afternoon when I was like, "Wait a minute. Did we actually stop building reactors in the '70s?" Like, who-- why did nobody tell me that? Um, and really since that moment, I had been, like, obsessively trying to understand why. Um, and I, I came to some conclusions about why, uh, when I was in high school, and I, I still hold those conclusions today. And then it was a, you know, 10-year journey of, like, waiting for someone to solve the problem, watching every nuclear startup that popped up, trying to figure out if they were gonna solve the problem, and eventually realizing that, that no one was gonna solve it at the pace and scale that was necessary. Uh, and so I started Valor.

4. 4:24 – 7:18

   Why Nuclear Development Stalled

   1. SGSarah Guo4:24

      So for people who come from outside the nuclear industry, like, why did we stop building reactors in this country?

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor4:29

      Yeah. We stopped for a pretty simple reason, which is Three Mile Island. So we were building a lot of reactors. We were doing really well. Um, we had a, a nuclear incident in the Three Mile, Three Mile Island reactor, and in that incident, we essentially lost the ability to, uh, cool the reactor. And in traditional, uh, light water reactors, you have to always be able to cool them, right? So if you shut a reactor down in, in traditional nuclear, you have to keep cooling it even after shutdown. And in this case, the cooling system failed, and so you had core meltdown. Now, nobody died, right? Uh, in fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured, and there was no radiation dose to the public. But, uh, it was sort of a optics and PR situation, um, that was mismanaged in many, many different ways, and the public, uh, became fearful and, and lost interest in nuclear. Now, I think that actually turned around even, like, 15, 20 years ago, where suddenly, uh, people looked back on that, and they said, "Okay, actually, we do know how to build reactors really safe." Even learnings from that, uh, we've taken and in-incorporated into new designs. But then there was a second problem, which was once you stop an industry, it's very hard to start it again. And in the intervening time between Three Mile Island and when people gained interest in nuclear again, we also really changed how we built things in the United States. Uh, we went from a country that was very good at large-scale civil infrastructure, right, bridges, roads, um, huge power plants, dams, highway systems, right? We were really good at large-scale civil infrastructure. Um, and we kind of atrophied at that skill set, and we got much better at advanced manufacturing. And so my realization, one of the first realizations I had about this was If you're going to reboot nuclear, and you actually believe in, in the atomic energy century, which I absolutely do, it's probably not going to look like what it did in the '60s. It's not gonna look like civil infrastructure because we're not that good at that anymore, and what we're way better at is producing, you know, more complicated and, uh, more functional pieces of manufactured equipment. And so you're gonna shift from the civil infrastructure way of building to a manufacturing way of building. And I think even though some people did realize that, and this is generally what you'd call SMRs, right, small modular reactors, what was missing is that people did not realize that you're gonna have to pursue that model through hardware iteration, and that's where, really where Valar is unique, is that, yes, we believe in SMRs, we believe in reactors that are manufactured, but we also know that in order to get there, you have to do it through hardware iteration. You have to turn some plants on. You have to turn on a 100-kilowatt reactor like the one behind us. You have to go cold critical like we did in Project Nova, and then you have to take the next steps after that, and it's gonna be driven by hardware iteration, and I think that's what nobody else realized before us.

   3. SGSarah Guo7:17

      So that's

5. 7:18 – 10:59

   Reviving Nuclear through DoE and Executive Order

   1. SGSarah Guo7:18

      a whole company philosophy for you, but it has to interact with a regulatory environment-

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor7:23

      Yeah

   3. SGSarah Guo7:23

      ... where I think the assumed status quo is you can't iterate because you can't turn anything on-

   4. ITIsaiah Taylor7:28

      Yes

   5. SGSarah Guo7:28

      ... because it's gonna take you 15 years to go through a permitting process and several billion dollars to get a no-

   6. ITIsaiah Taylor7:33

      Yes

   7. SGSarah Guo7:33

      ... or try again.

   8. ITIsaiah Taylor7:34

      Yes.

   9. SGSarah Guo7:34

      And so, like, why, why isn't that true now?

   10. ITIsaiah Taylor7:36

       There's this chicken and egg that existed for nuclear in the last 20 years where you need data in order to go to the regulator, but in order to go to the regulator with data, you have to have run a plant, right? And so there's this like, okay, how do you get the empirical data? And the way that people tried to solve that was with modeling and simulation, right? So if you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valar, it's mostly a modeling and simulation, uh, industry. Like, when you think of a nuclear company, right, there's like nuclear companies out there that everyone knows the name of, and you kind of look under the cover, it's actually a modeling and simulation company, right? They produce, um, very, very precise what we call paper reactors, which have really good predictions of how a theoretical thing might behave, and that was sort of the hack to try to get around this regulatory chicken and egg. But the alternative is that you actually just do what Congress originally intended. Um, if you look back at the early days of nuclear legislation, uh, there were actually two pathways for nuclear in the United States. There was the, uh, testing pathway and the commercial pathway. So the commercial pathway everyone knows is called the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC is solving for large-scale commercial deployment of mature systems. So yeah, if you try to do the iteration under the regulator that's concerned with large-scale commercial deployment of mature systems, that's gonna be tough, right? You're, you're gonna be asked commercial deployment questions when you're just trying to figure out how to bend some steel and get some atoms splitting. Um, but there's another pathway, and that pathway is the Department of Energy. So most people don't know this, but the Department of Energy was originally called the ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Agency, and people don't know that because it was only called the ERDA for about two years. So there was a little two-year period where, uh, it was, it was renamed shortly after. But its origin is actually a spin out of the Atomic Energy Commission. So where the DoE comes from originally is Congress taking the Atomic Energy Commission, which was one agency responsible for both commercial deployment and for testing, and they said, "Actually, let's split these out. Let's make the NRC in charge of commercial deployment. Let's make the ERDA in charge of testing, and we'll have these just two separate agencies." And then two years later, uh, Congress said, "Actually, we're just gonna call the ERDA the Department of Energy," right, the DoE. But the origin of this agency is testing nuclear reactors. That's, that's what it's for. Um, and everyone sort of forgot this. Um, it's just been sitting there in legislation for, like, 40 years, and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they wanna, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has, from a legal perspective, been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a, a way to accelerate nuclear R&D," uh, and that's exactly what the Trump administration has done. So the reactor that's, uh, behind us here, um, was turned on under an executive order. It was EO 14301, which called for three advanced reactors to go critical on American soil by July 4th, um, and, and we built it under Department of Energy, uh, authority under that executive order. So I mean, this is an incredibly exciting time in nuclear. This is really breaking that chicken and egg, right? It's the first time where we've been able to, to shortcut that, you know, problem of how do you get data, and, uh, and we have data now. We're currently, as we're sitting here, making 100 kilowatts, uh, splitting something like 10 to the 17 atoms per second, uh, in this reactor behind us. So this is the control room.

6. 10:59 – 16:17

   Control Room Tour

   1. ITIsaiah Taylor10:59

      There's two sections.

   2. SGSarah Guo11:00

      Okay.

   3. ITIsaiah Taylor11:00

      This is the, uh, control half. This door's closed. We have to have senior reactor operator's permission to enter here, which we just got. Thank you, Brent. And, uh, out here is sort of our, uh, observation room.

   4. SGSarah Guo11:12

      It looks like the control room in Hawthorne.

   5. ITIsaiah Taylor11:14

      It's, it is the exact control room in Hawthorne. We literally picked this up, put it on an airplane, and flew it here. So the entirety of the plant, including the control room, flew with us on the C-17s. Uh, first time that's ever been done, which is pretty cool.

   6. SGSarah Guo11:25

      How many people, um, operate?

   7. ITIsaiah Taylor11:27

      We got one, one operator at the controls who's the reactor operator who's controlling all this. Then you got a senior reactor operator who provides oversight and kind of ensures that we're staying within our safety limits and stuff. But we always have to have one person at the controls maintaining safety, maintaining the reactor.

   8. ITIsaiah Taylor11:47

      So in a couple of days here, we're gonna do a scram. So we're gonna press that big red button right there. Uh, big red button scrams the reactor, so basically drops the rods, right? Dropping the control rods will introduce a lot of boron carbide into the core. When we scram that, rods will drop, boron carbide enters the core. Boron is a strong neutron absorber, and so there will not be enough neutrons to maintain criticality because the neutron population gets absorbed into the, into the rods. So that'll cause the reaction to stop. Now, in a nuclear reactor, this is getting to the core of, like, what is Valar doing differently? Why do we really believe that the technology that we have here is gonna scale? Traditionally, um, when you scram the reactor in a light water reactor, your work is nowhere near done yet, right? The next really day of operations is incredibly important because when you turn the reactor off in a traditional nuclear reactor, um, you still have a lot of heat produced, and you have a lot of heat produced because in a nuclear core, you still have about 5%, uh, heat production from recently split atoms. So when a reactor's running, you have a bunch of atoms being split, they're producing a ton of energy, and even after the reaction shuts down, you s- you have recently split atoms that are continuing down their decay chains.

   9. SGSarah Guo13:03

      Mm-hmm.

   10. ITIsaiah Taylor13:04

       So this is called decay heat. Um, and decay heat's about 5 to 6% of what your continuous power was before you shut down. And in a traditional reactor, the, the reactor would melt down if you wouldn't, if you didn't continue to run the cooling pumps after turning the reactor off. So there's no more fission occurring. You don't have a, a chain reaction anymore, but you do have this decay heat, and if you were to sort of let it sit there, that heat would build up, and you would have meltdown. That's exactly what happened in Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Um, and so the way that they deal with this in traditional plants is they have very, very carefully built cooling systems that they continue to run for about 24 hours after shutdown. Um, and they try to build in all these redundancies and, and make sure that in any circumstance, the cooling systems never, ever, ever fail. Um, and that works pretty well. And, and nuclear is, is the safest form of energy ever made. Um, even with sort of that caveat, um, Three Mile Island, you know, even though it melted down, nobody died, right? Fukushima, uh, arguably maybe one person died. It's sort of a debate among scientists whether that person died from radiation or not. Um, so even as traditional nuclear is, it's very safe, but we wanna do even better, and we wanna do better 'cause we are interested in scale. We wanna make thousands of reactors, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and when you're doing that, you really just want it to never, ever melt down for any reason, right? And so the best way to do that is actually just to make active cooling systems unnecessary altogether, and that's actually what we're gonna demonstrate on Friday. We're gonna scram this reactor. Immediately after we scram, we are actually gonna turn off the entire electrical supply to the plant. We're gonna turn off the circulator. We're gonna turn off the RCCS pump. Every safety system in this plant, we're gonna shut off, and we're gonna watch what happens. Now, we have a cheat code. We know what's gonna happen, uh, because we did this in Hawthorne before we had, uh, neutrons in it. Uh, we ran the f- the plant at full power, uh, with electrical simulators. We basically have these electrical resistors in the plant in Hawthorne. We put about 15 city blocks worth of LA power into this and got it up to full nuclear temperatures and pressures.

   11. SGSarah Guo15:11

       Right, I remember seeing the sim. Yeah.

   12. ITIsaiah Taylor15:12

       Yeah. Uh, and so we, we held it there, and then we did exactly what we're about to do, which is we turned off all safety systems at once, and we watched the plant for two days, um, and exactly what we had hoped, uh, happened, which is that the, uh, RCCS panels, which are these water jackets around the core, um, went into passive circulation mode, meaning the water boils, the steam leaves, it condenses, that removes heat, and you have natural circulation with no moving parts. Um, so zero input from the operators, no moving parts, no electrical control. It's just the geometry of that system that slowly just removes that decay heat over a period of two days. So we're about to demonstrate that, uh, right here starting on Friday after 72 hours of, at full power. So that'll be a really exciting demonstration, and it, it's really the basis of, of scale, right? If we're gonna do this, uh, many times, we wanna make sure that just from the basic physics, this reactor doesn't melt down, not because of operator control, not because of really good engineering, but the physics of the plant make it safe from meltdown.

   13. SGSarah Guo16:16

       One of the

7. 16:17 – 20:07

   Misunderstandings About Nuclear

   1. SGSarah Guo16:17

      huge reasons for, um, the slowdown in investment in real R&D in this space has been concerns about the safety profile.

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor16:27

      Yeah.

   3. SGSarah Guo16:27

      You and your team are, you know, very respectful of, but not particularly concerned-

   4. ITIsaiah Taylor16:32

      Yeah

   5. SGSarah Guo16:32

      ... that this is an insurmountable problem.

   6. ITIsaiah Taylor16:34

      Yeah.

   7. SGSarah Guo16:34

      What do people outside nuclear misunderstand about safety of these SMRs-

   8. ITIsaiah Taylor16:38

      Yeah

   9. SGSarah Guo16:38

      ... and your design in particular?

   10. ITIsaiah Taylor16:39

       There's two big misunderstandings. One is that people pr- you know, generally perceive nuclear as, like, stable, cheap base load, but kind of dangerous with downsides. I think that's just a complete misperception. Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically.

   11. SGSarah Guo16:54

       Mm-hmm.

   12. ITIsaiah Taylor16:54

       If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount of, amount of deaths, um, it's even safer than solar, which is very strange-

   13. SGSarah Guo17:01

       [laughs]

   14. ITIsaiah Taylor17:01

       'cause how does someone die from solar? But actually, most solar is installed on roofs, and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar, and if you add those deaths up, it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world. Um, so that's actually kind of crazy. Nuclear as it is today is already the safest form of energy. Now, the only problem with existing nuclear is that I, I think the ex- the existing philosophy, again, it's the safest in the world, but we can do better, and where we'd like to improve is the existing philosophy says, okay, there's... I- if you look at risk, it's actually composed of two different things, right? It's composed of the odds of the thing happening and the consequence if it does happen. And traditional nuclear has focused on risk reduction by reducing the odds, right? So they say, okay, yeah, a meltdown could have some bad consequence, so let's make sure that it never, ever, ever happens. And all of the effort into risk reduction goes into low odds of anything ever happening. The alternative way that you can reduce risk is actually just reducing consequence, right? And we would argue that that's a much better way to reduce risk. Odds, uh, are stochastic, right? Even if you do an enormous amount of risk reduction on odds and you do all this engineering, something's still gonna happen, right? Like, just something's gonna come out of left field, and you can't predict everything. Um, and so advanced reactors tend to focus on consequence more than odds. Now, we still don't, you know, we, we, we still try to protect against things like Um, you know, we have site security here, for example, right? So someone can't come in and compromise the control room. But from an engineering perspective, we also say, "Well, what if someone did compromise the control room? How do we still make sure that it's perfectly safe?" Um, and so advanced reactors really focus on that, that second thing. Um, our safety basis when we go to the regulator is everything in the plant has failed. Absolutely everything, right? Everything-

   15. SGSarah Guo18:55

       And we know what happens.

   16. ITIsaiah Taylor18:56

       Yeah.

   17. SGSarah Guo18:56

       Yeah.

   18. ITIsaiah Taylor18:56

       Uh, in fact, it is, it is safe, right? So we have, uh, regulatory limits where we say, "Okay, in an accident scenario, you can't dose the public with radiation," right? That's really ultimately what a nuclear regulator is trying to prevent. You can't dose the public and workers with radiation. And so our safety basis says, "All right, let's look at the reactor design and pretend that everything in it has failed. Are we dosing the, you know, workers and the public r- with radiation?" And the answer is no. Um, and that's super, super important because even though we do still try to reduce the odds, we have site security, we make sure that our operators are well-trained, we start with the worst-case possible scenario where everything has failed, and we say, "How do we make that fa- that, that safe?" And that's really a physics problem. It, it's really about the geometry of the core. It's about the materials that you use. TRISO is a huge part of that. Um, and, and that's how we pursue safety. So I think that, that people miss that, A, nuclear is already very safe, but B, the new breed of r- of nuclear is much more focused on just making sure that these plants are intrinsically and inherently safe regardless of odds, right? Regardless of what crazy thing comes out of left field. Um, and that's a much better way to scale.

   19. SGSarah Guo20:06

       What are the major

8. 20:07 – 22:14

   Issues with Reliability

   1. SGSarah Guo20:07

      causes of, um, like, reliability issues for a reactor?

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor20:11

      Of this design, let's see. Helium circulator is one area that people have had trouble with in the past. Uh, the heat exchanger between the main helium loop and the secondary power conversion loop is something that Fort Saint Vrain has, has had issues with. Uh, I don't know, Jess, what do you think?

   3. SPSpeaker20:29

      Moisture as well.

   4. ITIsaiah Taylor20:30

      Yep.

   5. SPSpeaker20:30

      Fort Saint Vrain had problems with moisture, so graphite is hydrophilic, meaning that it loves to take moisture. Even in the hot desert air, hot, dry desert air, it still sucks up moisture. Um, so we have mitigated that risk by having a helium purification system, and part of that is taking the moisture and the, and trying to condense that moist air out of the system and then put it into some supply tanks or ex-excusing me, some storage tanks. Outside of that, we know it's, it's a, it's a known fact that for several hundred hours of operation, we'll be slowly leaching that moisture out of the graphite blocks as we keep, uh, keep them and maintain the te-temperature. So as you know, graphite's surrounding probably some of the block on the way in, um, so it's kind of difficult to migrate that moisture from the center of the block all the way out. That's why it takes so long. It's just keeping it up to temperature, and it slowly migrates its way out of the blocks. But if you don't capture that moisture and remove it from the system, then you can imagine any carbon still which is in the system will be in the rest, then the rest particles will migrate and either cause a shortage in the motor or a blockage in the system somewhere. Um, so anyway, that's one of the lessons learned from Fort Saint Vrain is you need to remove the moisture from the system.

   6. ITIsaiah Taylor21:33

      I will say that helium graphite systems have a lot of natural advantages. Um, and, uh, yeah, th-there's basically no chemistry going on other than the bit of moisture that we need to pull out of the graphite blocks. Helium is inert, right? And unlike a water-based reactor where you have, you're very, very carefully trying to make sure you have dry steam if it's dry steam plant, and wet steam is gonna start just destroying all of your turbo machinery and everything, um, helium is, uh, a very, very inert, simple chemical, uh, to work as a working fluid. Now, there are downsides to it. It's not very dense. You have to have more pumping power, these sorts of things. Um, but the fundamentals are in our favor in terms of building a very simple plant.

   7. SGSarah Guo22:13

      When we

9. 22:14 – 24:32

   Nuclear is a Hardware Execution Problem

   1. SGSarah Guo22:14

      think about, you know, an abundance of nuclear power-

   2. ITIsaiah Taylor22:16

      Yeah

   3. SGSarah Guo22:17

      ... I think a lot of interested listeners will have heard of a number of SMR startups-

   4. ITIsaiah Taylor22:21

      Yeah

   5. SGSarah Guo22:21

      ... and people building larger scale reactors. Um, how do you, how do you break out, like, the different use cases and the different designs here? Are, are people aiming at different power levels and efficiencies? Um, is it just a completely different philosophy of company? How do, how do you look at that landscape?

   6. ITIsaiah Taylor22:40

      Yeah. I would make one big division in nuclear companies, and it is people who believe that nuclear is essentially a hardware execution problem and people who believe that it's a design problem. Um, Valar is solidly in the camp that we believe this is a hardware and execution problem. This is really an issue of can you build reactors? Can you turn them on? Can you get them running? Can you operate them well? Can you produce them at scale? Can you go from making one to 10 to 100 to 1,000? Um, that is the, the problem of nuclear. Um, the second class of nuclear companies, I think are mistaken, think that this is a, a problem of, like, making the most beautiful design, making the most sophisticated design. The design will have, you know, the most perfect efficiency. Um, you know, you look inside some of these, uh, these design documents, and there's so much complexity and, you know, the materials that go into it are super rare, and you have to set up entire supply chains that don't exist just to get the thing running. And I look at that, and I say, "Okay, maybe over time, the reactor grows in complexity, and, um, you, you start to use some more rare materials to try to get higher and higher performance." But the problem of nuclear today is, like, the Toyota Camry problem, right? Like, we don't wanna make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. Um, and actually, that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world, right? Um, you maybe will get a little bit better performance out of a more complicated reactor, but I'm gonna beat you on cost because I'm making 1,000 of them, right? And that's really what we care about. Valar is in the business of making energy 10 times cheaper for, for humanity, um, and we want to continue doing that forever. There will always be ways to make energy cheaper and cheaper, um, and that's very much our goal. And I think the big difference in, in philosophy is do you tackle that through building reactors and through iteration, or do you tackle that through design? And, and we believe it's entirely a hardware problem.

   7. SGSarah Guo24:31

      Where

10. 24:32 – 26:32

    Timeline to Scale Production

    1. SGSarah Guo24:32

       and the, so the company is less than three years old-

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor24:34

       Yes

    3. SGSarah Guo24:34

       ... just about to turn three.

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor24:35

       Yep.

    5. SGSarah Guo24:36

       Um, where in the timeline of, you know, hundreds of reactors are we?

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor24:41

       Yeah. We just turned on number one. So we went critical back in November. That was our first criticality. Um, that was what you'd call a, a cold criticality or critical pile. Um, and just a, a few days ago, we made power for the first time in our first reactor, so that's the, the Ward 250 reactor. Um, obviously the next goal is go turn on another one. Uh, but there's a sort of a success metric here that we talk about in the company and, and we call it tick rate. So tick rate is, is how we judge ourselves and how we judge other people in the nuclear field. Um, tick rate is, you know, comes from video games, right? And it's sort of the, uh, the time in between changes in the game state, right? And, um, for us, what this means is how long from the founding of our company to the first time we split an atom, to the second time, to the third time, to the fourth time, and the goal of the company is to get that tick rate as low as possible, right? So our first ever mark from filing in Delaware to first atom split was two years and four months. From, uh, Project Nova first atom split to the second time here in this reactor was about seven months, and the goal is to get that window as short as possible. Um, and we will get it down to minutes. Um, this company will get, will, will get to the point where we have a new reactor turning on every few minutes. And when we do that, if you look at the, um, the economics of nuclear, it really is driven by how quickly and cheaply can you produce plants, right? The uranium is very cheap, right? The f- the fuel is very cheap. The question is, can you produce plants quickly and cheaply? And that is going to be driven by iteration and by scale, which ultimately is driven by tick rate. So I'm very proud of the team. We've done some enormous, uh, incredible things that no other nuclear startup has been able to do yet, but we are nowhere near done. We're very hungry, um, and we're gonna make that tick rate, you know, six months, and then four, and then one, and, and then into the minutes. Welcome

11. 26:32 – 30:42

    Introducing Ward 250

    1. ITIsaiah Taylor26:32

       to Ward 250.

    2. SGSarah Guo26:33

       Wow.

    3. ITIsaiah Taylor26:34

       Uh, so where you are standing right now, uh, is the first advanced reactor to ever make power by a startup, the first advanced reactor ever built outside of a national laboratory. This is the fifth new nuclear device to make power in the United States since the year 2000. Valar is the only private company founded since the discovery of nuclear fission that has ever made nuclear power. Um, and this is really the thing that, that is unique about what we're doing, is that we're a new team, we're a new company, and we're attacking nuclear fission from first principles. You know, all the other companies in the space who've actually made power before were, you know, are 100-year-old or 150-year-old utilities, defense contractors, large engineering corporations, and they haven't really done fundamental R&D. What they've done is they've picked up sort of government work, commercialized it a little bit, done some su- some supply chain integration, uh, but this is like startup mindset applied to nuclear fission, and there's a lot of things about this plant that's different that you'll be able to see. The first one is what we're looking at right here. This big, awesome structure is called the Modular Citadel. I'm gonna talk to you for a few minutes about concrete, and it's gonna sound like I'm a big concrete nerd, and I guess that's okay, but, uh, this is actually some of the more innovative stuff that we've done in this reactor. The purpose of this concrete is a bioshield. The reason we're able to stand here and not, uh, be receiving unhealthy doses of radiation right now is because there's 78 inches of concrete, uh, in, in front of this reactor. If this concrete were not here, uh, we would not be able to stand here, but it's actually very special concrete. The Modular Citadel is, uh, a series of precast blocks. So each of these blocks was actually created in a factory. It's our factory. We have a, uh, a, what we call the Citadel factory in Salt Lake City, um, and we have a production line where we can create 3,000 blocks a year that are identical to these. Uh, and they arrive here on a truck, and then they get placed by this crane up here, so that's why we have this crane. It can place these blocks. And what's really awesome about this is people have thought about doing this before in nuclear. They've thought about precast blocks, but the problem is, like, well, if you're gonna put two concrete blocks together, if you were to zoom in on a microscopic level, those blocks are actually not touching, right? Nothing's actually touching on a microscopic level. You have a little gap between there, and gamma rays can slip between the gaps, and neutrons can slip between the gaps. So what you can't see here, and I'll show you some photos afterward, is that if you were to look with an X-ray in, in that seam right there, you would actually see that the concrete itself follows what we call a tortuous path. So it's a sine wave. So the concrete on every seam follows a sine wave curve, and actually on the, uh, vertical edges as well. So if you were to look in that vertical seam, you would also see a sine wave. If you were to look in the corners, you would see a sine wave. There is no straight path from the inside of the reactor to the outside through the modu- Modular Citadel for a, a, a ray to follow straight through concrete. Um, and what's even more interesting is that traditionally when people have thought of this, um, because it's really hard to get that casting shape right and to get it to actually be solid enough to bear all of this weight, um, the way that they'd get around this is they would grout it. So they would grout it with more concrete. You'd have, like, sort of a wet concrete mix that you use to seal them together. This has no grout. These blocks are literally just stacked. In fact, there's no mechanical lock between them either. There are no bolts. There are no screws. We do have this, um, frame around it. This is called a seismic frame. Um, we did this, uh, w- we actually don't need it according to our engineering calculations. Uh, the Utah State building code, uh, there was a disagreement about whether or not we need a seismic frame. They're like, "Well, let's just put it on just to be safe." Um, but the entire citadel has, uh, no fastening of any kind, uh, in the blocks, and what that means is we went from three months, which is what it would normally take to build a bioshield like this To we stacked this in about 42 hours

    4. SGSarah Guo30:41

       How do you explain the

12. 30:42 – 33:33

    Speed Through Simplicity

    1. SGSarah Guo30:42

       pace of what you're capable of doing here versus other people that are trying and have been trying?

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor30:47

       Yeah. The pace is extraordinary. Uh, and, you know, of course I'm proud of my team, of course I'm, uh, I think Valar is the best nuclear company out there, but I would argue empirically, uh, we have the, the highest pace of any nuclear company in the world, and it's not close. Um, and the reason for that is two things. One is we are obsessed with simplicity. Um, we want our designs to be as simple as possible. Um, we would rather have a simpler machine that's easier to build, that we can build at higher scale, than a machine that's more efficient, that's more performant. Um, we have ruth- ruthlessly deleted complexity, deleted parts, deleted systems where they're not necessary. Um, the other thing is we picked a super safe architecture, and, and this is, I think, a, um, a point that is hard to tell from the outside, because every reactor looks, uh, the same from the outside, and, and every CEO says that their reactor is safe. Um, and, and to some extent they all are, right? Because they're highly regulated and we make sure that they're safe. But there are levels to this, right? And it goes back to the, the previous conversation we had about odds versus consequence. Um, a TRISO fueled, graphite moderated, helium cooled reactor of the geometry that we've built it here is just about as safe as humanity knows how to build a nuclear reactor. And that actually allows us to move faster, right? Um, and that's going to allow us to scale as well. The lower that we can keep that consequence, the greater we're gonna be able to scale, and the faster we're gonna be able to move. The last thing is just the way that we have shaped this team. I have built this team very, very carefully. Um, I am deeply involved in every hiring decision, and, uh, we have filtered nuclear as an industry for people with extreme agency, um, people with extreme bias to action. And actually we, we have a lot of people from outside nuclear, right? A lot of the people here now have more nuclear experience than, you know, any other startup because they've actually turned a plant on. But when they walked in, uh, they had never seen a nuclear reactor before. But what they had done is built hard things in the real world, right? And so we try to find those people who build hard things. And then within nuclear, I particularly love to find people that, uh, started in nuclear because they loved it, and they realized it was really slow. And then they left and they're like, "Screw this, I'm gonna go do something interesting." And then they, you know, built a ton of hardware somewhere else, and then I convince them to come back, um, because I know that they love it. And I'm like, "If you come back here, you're gonna be able to actually build and actually execute, but in something that, that I know you love." So, um, also lots of people from the traditional nuclear world, but, but those people we filter very, very hard for, do you wanna do science? Do you wanna, like, write papers, or do you want to build reactors and turn them on? And, um, the entire Valar team is laser focused on that.

    3. SGSarah Guo33:32

       How much of

13. 33:33 – 35:02

    AI Drives Nuclear Demand

    1. SGSarah Guo33:33

       the premise of Valar is possible now comes from there are increasing demands for power, you know, in the United States, largely driven by AI compute?

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor33:44

       Yeah. So I'm, I'm super grateful for, you know, all our partners in, in the AI space. Um, NVIDIA, of course, we've got a big event that we're talking about today. Um, and we'll talk about that more in a minute, what we did here with NVIDIA. But I would like to point out that energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price, right? So if you can reduce the price, you increase the demand, and that will be true about energy forever, right? From now until the end of time, we know that energy is, is sort of the only scarce thing in the universe, right? It's the only irreversible thing in the universe in terms of a resource. And so if you can figure out how to make energy cheaper, you will have demand.

    3. SGSarah Guo34:22

       Mm.

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor34:22

       Um, and, and so I, I view Valar as having a fundamentally infinite market, because if we can figure out how to make, you know, energy at one cent, you induce your own demand, right? We begin to imagine ways to do things better with cheaper energy. If you can make it a 10th of a cent, you've induced even more. And so yes, it's awesome that we have these, you know, tailwinds of customers who are really hungry for power. I think it's also great just from a, um, a public awareness perspective, where suddenly everyone remembers that power is super important, right? But I also know that, uh, fundamentally making energy cheaper is what induces demand for more energy, and that's really gonna be our strategy for the next century.

    5. SGSarah Guo35:01

       Can you

14. 35:02 – 36:27

    Running a Reactor with NVIDIA Blackwell

    1. SGSarah Guo35:02

       talk about what you are doing with NVIDIA?

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor35:04

       Yeah. So, uh, we did something pretty awesome today. Um, we powered, uh, the first ever AI chip powered by a nuclear reactor. Uh, so we took an NVIDIA Blackwell, um, super grateful, uh, to them for providing the system to us, and we connected it directly to our nuclear reactor. Um, and we actually hosted, uh, the nuclear website. So depending on when s- this podcast drops, you'll be able to see it. Uh, if you go to nuclearwebsite.com, that website is directly hosted on the nuclear reactor. Um, it is entirely coming from that chip provided by NVIDIA.

    3. SGSarah Guo35:38

       I'm gonna consume some nuclear power. Nice.

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor35:40

       Yeah. Uh, actually on the website, if you go on it right now, we tell you exactly how many atoms of uranium were split in order to deliver that webpage to you. Um, we've, uh, we've always been asked if we're gonna sell merch, and I've always said that we're not gonna sell any merch until we've actually split an atom. Um, and so actually the nuclear website is the only place you can buy Valar merch. Uh, so you actually have to buy it hosted from the reactor. Uh, so we, we take building in the physical world, um, very seriously. Uh, the other thing is, if you're watching this podcast too late, you're not gonna be able to see it anymore, because once the reactor turns off, uh, the, the website is directly hosted from there, so it won't be available anymore. Uh, so there's some exclusivity too as well.

    5. SGSarah Guo36:15

       So I gotta tune in while it's live.

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor36:16

       That's right. You have to tune in while the reactor's running. We'll keep it running for a few days, uh, as we continue our final testing, um, and we'll go through various tests over the next few months.

    7. SGSarah Guo36:26

       When you go talk to the big

15. 36:27 – 40:16

    Valar’s Nuclear Conviction

    1. SGSarah Guo36:27

       buyers of compute and thus power today, they will say nobody can deliver at scale until like '31-

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor36:36

       Yeah

    3. SGSarah Guo36:36

       ... '32, and until then it's gonna be, um, diesel gensets-

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor36:41

       Yeah

    5. SGSarah Guo36:41

       ... and maybe solar and batteries-

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor36:44

       Yeah

    7. SGSarah Guo36:44

       ... and, you know, we gotta figure out how Uh, to, to make it until that period of time. What, what do you believe that they don't believe about the next five years?

    8. ITIsaiah Taylor36:54

       Yeah, I think that they've looked at all of these, uh, nuclear companies of the past, and again, most of the nuclear industry is a modeling and simulation industry. That's really what it is. If you, you know, companies are what they do, right? And so I actually did not allow Valar Atomics to call ourselves a nuclear startup until we had split-

    9. SGSarah Guo37:11

       So you're concrete pouring in graphite

    10. ITIsaiah Taylor37:13

        We, we are-

    11. SGSarah Guo37:14

        Yeah [laughs]

    12. ITIsaiah Taylor37:14

        ... legitimately a nuclear company because we split atoms, right?

    13. SGSarah Guo37:16

        Mm-hmm.

    14. ITIsaiah Taylor37:16

        Um, but, you know, I'm, I'm serious, we didn't allow ourselves to call ourselves a nuclear startup until we'd split the first atom, right? Because companies are what they do. Before that, we were a company that was planning to split an atom. Now we're a company that has done it, uh, you know, 10 to the 20 or so atoms so far. Uh, that number will keep going up. Um, but, uh, yeah, so I, I think there's a, a just a big gap in mindset between are you serious about scale? And I would also point out that exponential curves are very counterintuitive, right? If you look at the predictions of how many satellites would be in orbit, um, when, when SpaceX started going, people were like, "There's no way they're gonna hit the numbers that they're hitting today." And exponentials are just really, really hard for, for humans to understand. Um, so I would say, yeah, i- if you're looking at the nuclear space today, you don't expect people to have this problem solved in 2031. In fact, I would say even 2035, a lot of these companies are still not gonna get there because they have the wrong mindset. They're not focused on hardware iteration, hardware execution, building the simplest and safest reactor that allows them to scale, and Valar just demonstrated that we are. We actually had to invent our own grade of concrete in order to do this. Um, and the reason is we need a high enough density to block gamma rays. The concrete also needs to be very strong because these are self-stacking blocks. And we also can't use rebar because if we use rebar, um, rebar becomes activated by neutrons. Uh, so you'll actually be producing nuclear waste. We took two, uh, two engineers on our team, one of them is a, uh, nuclear physics, uh, uh, mechanical en-- Sorry, one of them a mechanical engineer, one of them nuclear physics, and we had them tag team this. We said, "Go invent a grade of concrete which has the density to block gamma rays, which has the strength to actually be a concrete block that's self-cast, that has no rebar, and that has the right atomic mix that it will not become, uh, nuclear waste when it becomes irradiated." And they literally flew all around the country collecting rock samples from all around the United States. Uh, we called it The Rock Hunt. It was about a three-week period from plane to plane, literally collecting bags of rocks, and they would come back on a Friday night, and they'd set up the conference room with a bunch of buckets of acid, and they would dissolve the rocks, and then they would take the rocks through a spectroscopy analysis to figure out the exact BPM, and then they'd go back out the next week and collect the next sample. Um, by the way, the, uh, the two team members are twenty-three years old and twenty-one years old respectively, and they've done things that the nuclear industry has been dreaming of for literally thirty years. When we unveiled the system for the first time, we got DMed from, from people who have been in nuclear literally their entire career saying, "I've been writing about how someone should do something like this since the 1980s, and I've never seen, uh, anyone be able to actually pull it off." And that's the really awesome thing about working Valar, at Valar. That's also why we get the best talent in the world, is because if you're a really, really talented person who cares about nuclear, you wanna see things actually get built, and it's, you need to go where, where you can actually build things.

    15. SGSarah Guo40:15

        You are

16. 40:16 – 43:58

    Verticalization as Path to Scale

    1. SGSarah Guo40:16

       not a paper and simulation company. You're a nuclear company.

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor40:19

       Yes.

    3. SGSarah Guo40:19

       But you also seem to be a road-building company and a building-building company-

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor40:23

       [laughs]

    5. SGSarah Guo40:23

       ... and a concrete-pouring company-

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor40:25

       Yes

    7. SGSarah Guo40:25

       ... and a rock-finding company.

    8. ITIsaiah Taylor40:26

       Yes.

    9. SGSarah Guo40:27

       So how, how do you think about-- You're very opinionated that, you know, if we must for speed, we will verticalize.

    10. ITIsaiah Taylor40:32

        Yes.

    11. SGSarah Guo40:32

        How do you think about, like, having those capabilities and why you make that decision?

    12. ITIsaiah Taylor40:37

        Yeah. I mean, this is the secret weapon of Valar, and I'm gonna give you the secret weapon because I fully believe that no one will be able to copy us in this. Um, we are willing to verticalize anything that is necessary on our path to scale. Um, and we've proven that a couple times in this, in this reactor so far, uh, in areas that we were told repeatedly was utterly impossible. Um, and the fact is, like, when a problem is important enough, you can go solve it, and you can verticalize it because when a problem is as important as making energy cheap, um, you can go get the most talented people in the world to come and help you solve that problem, right? You can assemble the brightest minds to tackle it. You can get the best capital formation, who, who helps you go and, and acquire the resources necessary. Um, and it's really a mindset thing. You know, we've talked to and, and know many of the most talented nuclear engineers in the world, and what we keep finding over and over is, yes, there are amazing designs, um, but not much has actually been physically built. And if you have the muscle as a company to build things in the physical world, if you know how to do fundamental clean sheet design all the way through to prototyping, testing, and manufacturing, um, you have an edge, right, that, that nobody else has in nuclear today. Um, and so we look at really anything in the stack. And it's not that we want to verticalize everything. We'd prefer that most of the plants commoditize, right? In theory, it'd be great if we could just buy a kit, right? Like, if I, if anyone is selling a nuclear reactor kit, I'm a buyer, right? I'm gonna go staple it together, and I'm gonna make energy, and that's great.

    13. SGSarah Guo42:07

        You're just gonna make lots of plants.

    14. ITIsaiah Taylor42:08

        Exactly.

    15. SGSarah Guo42:09

        Yeah.

    16. ITIsaiah Taylor42:09

        But, you know, that's not how it works. In, in, in actuality, um, there are a lot of these components that are wildly overpriced, that have super constrained supplies, and a fundamental edge that Valar has is that we know we are competent to verticalize any individual piece of that that prevents scale. Um, and once we identify that, um, we attack it ruthlessly.

    17. SGSarah Guo42:30

        And you don't think any piece of it is, like, you know, intersecting with more regulatory pain, too complicated for you to figure out? Like, when I think about-

    18. ITIsaiah Taylor42:38

        Yeah

    19. SGSarah Guo42:38

        ... your fuel supply chain, for example.

    20. ITIsaiah Taylor42:39

        Yeah, it's definitely intersecting with regulatory pain.

    21. SGSarah Guo42:41

        [laughs] Right.

    22. ITIsaiah Taylor42:41

        Um, and, like, we run at that pain. Like, we just run toward gunfire on the most complicated things every time. We're two and a half years, three and a half, you know, three years into this company, and we've done something that no other nuclear startup has ever done, which is make nuclear power. Um- And it, it comes from this fundamental mindset that the teams, that the team has, which is, yes, there are complexities in regulation. Yes, this is hard, you know, equipment to manufacture. Um, yes, it's difficult to do both of those at the same time where you have complex equipment and regulation and construction and rock hunting and pouring concrete and building buildings. But the company that figures out how to do all of that complexity at scale and at pace is going to win. And, you know, we're sitting here right now, you know, less than three years from the founding of the company, and I think if you look back at 10 years, uh, in 10 years from now, and, you know, Valar's worth $500 billion, something like that, um, you will be able to see that through line where we took the hardest parts of nuclear, right, which is the site, right, and the regulatory and the fuel supply chain and the instrumentation and the shielding and all of these things that everyone tries to outsource, and we said, "Actually, we're gonna become masters of that," right? And we're gonna go hire the best people in the world to tackle that, and that becomes our edge, um, and in the actual manufacturing. This is

17. 43:58 – 48:00

    Valar’s Control Skid

    1. ITIsaiah Taylor43:58

       another really good example of makes, what makes Valar unique. This is our control skid. Uh, these three boxes right there are, uh, basically a analog to digital electronics box. Uh, so if you know anything about, uh, electronic circuitry, it's pretty simple stuff. You've got some signal amplifiers. You have some basic rectifiers in there. Uh, and, and basically we take some analog signals from our, our detectors, and we send them to the control room. Each one of those boxes costs $450,000. This is when, when anyone talks to you about, like, cost in nuclear, like, "Oh, nuclear is expensive," uh, they are talking about ridiculous things like this, right? And this is really where Valar's gonna win. Now, we accepted the $450,000 cost on this one because we're moving really fast, you know, and spending a million and a half dollars for these three boxes was more worthwhile to us than taking a couple months of delay. But this box over here, totally different story. This one, it was bid out at $5 million. They told us that it was gonna cost $5 million to buy that box right there. That is our, um, what's called Reactor Protection System, RPS. This is basically the brain of the reactor. Uh, this system right here is super unique. It has no human input. It's basically a self-deterministic, uh, machine that decides whether or not the plant is in a safe state. So it has three different sections that vote against itself to say, is the plant in a safe state or not, and if two of them vote that the plant is not in a safe state, it shuts down. And, uh, we were quoted about $5 million, uh, and we were told it would take, it would take about two and a half years to build. Um, and so we said, "Well, all right, maybe I'd be willing to pay $5 million, but I'm certainly not gonna wait two and a half years." And so after having haggled with this vendor for about two months, trying to convince him to go faster, uh, we eventually got the team together and said, "Guys, we're gonna have to build our own RPS." And, uh, we sat down with Joe, who runs instrumentation and control, uh, awesome guy, Brown dropout, uh, really, really good with electronics, and he brought together five team members and, uh, locked ourselves in the conference room, and, uh, six weeks later, we had a w- a working RPS, and we spent about $400,000 on it. Um, everywhere in nuclear is like this. There are, uh, totally fake costs from an industry that is just totally anemic and doesn't know how to build anything anymore. By the way, the conclusion to that story is kind of unfortunate, which is that when the vendor realized that we were gonna do it ourselves because we just could not, you know, get our heads around a two-year timeline, uh, they freaked out and started telling everybody in the industry that we're an unsafe company that's gonna kill people, uh, because we would dare to, to do something ourselves that, you know, is their special sauce that they're charging the market five million dollars for. Uh, and if you go to... I don't know if you guys use any of these, like, investor search platforms where you can, like, go look up a company and people have done, like, expert calls. Um, they contacted all of those expert calls companies and volunteered to do an expert call on Valar where their CTO-

    2. SGSarah Guo47:10

       Oh, shitty. [laughs]

    3. ITIsaiah Taylor47:12

       Yeah, their CTO, uh, basically went and, like, ranted about how we're the worst company on Earth, uh, because this is a massive, massive threat to them, the fact that their $5 million system we can just make for a couple hundred grand with a team of five engineers. Uh, but the more that you look into nuclear, the more it's like this. Everywhere you look, it's a fake industry that has not been building anything for 40 years, and the little bit that they have been building, they're charging a 100X margin on. But if you just take it from first principles, and you have smart people in the room, and you're willing to build it yourself, you end up with this, and the plant is running.

    4. SGSarah Guo47:46

       There is something very inspiring about the idea of, like, given the physics work-

    5. ITIsaiah Taylor47:52

       Yeah

    6. SGSarah Guo47:52

       ... it should be possible.

    7. ITIsaiah Taylor47:53

       Absolutely.

    8. SGSarah Guo47:54

       And if it is possible to do it faster here, the best people will come-

    9. ITIsaiah Taylor47:57

       Yes

    10. SGSarah Guo47:57

        ... and the capital will come.

    11. ITIsaiah Taylor47:58

        Exactly.

    12. SGSarah Guo47:59

        Um,

18. 48:00 – 50:51

    Venture-Backed Nuclear

    1. SGSarah Guo48:00

       this is an expensive project-

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor48:02

       Yep

    3. SGSarah Guo48:02

       ... as far as I can tell. Uh, how do you think about the fact that the, uh, you're an equity-financed, venture-backed company today?

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor48:10

       Yeah.

    5. SGSarah Guo48:10

       How, how do you think about the fact that the, like, debt vehicles, project financing, operational proof of this doesn't really exist in the ecosystem to-

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor48:19

       Yeah

    7. SGSarah Guo48:19

       ... you know, perhaps support as much scale as you'd like, as quickly as you'd like?

    8. ITIsaiah Taylor48:22

       Yeah. So this is actually one of the things that I noticed, um, years before starting the company. The, the sort of traditional plan for a nuclear startup is you try to do some engineering and some design and some customer LOIs, MOUs, and you try to assemble this package, and it's a, it's essentially paper, right? But it's a package that's attractive enough to get somebody to come and fund the project, right? That's the essential plan of all nuclear startups. They want to, uh, convince a, a debt financer or a project financer or something like that to fund their nice paper package of designs and partnerships. Um- I went into this company believing that, uh... And by the way, I believe that that was possible, like, 10 years ago.

    9. SGSarah Guo49:04

       Mm-hmm.

    10. ITIsaiah Taylor49:05

        And after watching this fail over and over and over in other startups, um, I came into this company knowing we're not gonna do that. Um, one of the unique advantages that the United States has is a risk-on equity capital environment, right? And the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is, um, we know the physics works, we know that there's infinite demand, and how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in the United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world, right? That is how Silicon Valley has come to be what it is. That is how venture capital has come to, you know, eat as much of, of finance as it has, is that venture capitalists know how to underwrite technical risk. Um, and it's execution, and it's, you know, when we say tech, we're not talking about physics, we're not talking about science, we're talking about mechanical engineering, we're talking about thermal hydraulics, we're talking about instrumentation, right, manufacturing methods. These are, um... It's complicated, it's nuclear, but it's, like, significantly less complicated than a rocket engine, for example. Um, so, you know, I think this is one of our, our fundamental edges and advantages is that, um, we're risk-on about this, and we have a cap table that's, that's risk-on about this. We are willing to go build reactors on equity balance sheet because that's going to allow us to prove it years ahead of anybody else, right? Where, where our competitors are still trying to convince, you know, uh, fundamentally risk-averse, uh, you know, financers to, to finance a project, we will be on our fifth reactor, right? And after five reactors, well, actually now project finance is an option, right? Now debt is an option. But it's an only an option, uh, once those early backers have put the capital in the ground and demonstrated it, and that becomes an enormous moat that's frankly gonna be impossible to beat.

    11. SGSarah Guo50:50

        Oh.

19. 50:51 – 53:11

    Gigasite Strategy

    1. SGSarah Guo50:51

       One of the more different things that you've decided to do here, um, is, you know, try to build your own plant independently-

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor51:01

       Yes

    3. SGSarah Guo51:01

       ... and bring customers to it as, you know, at much scale as possible in a giga-site.

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor51:06

       Yes.

    5. SGSarah Guo51:07

       Right? Um, and, you know, part of the belief there is like, well, if I can provide power at scale, and especially cheap power, like, the load will come to me-

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor51:15

       Yes

    7. SGSarah Guo51:15

       ... for many things. Um, you know, can you describe, like, the rationale behind that strategy?

    8. ITIsaiah Taylor51:22

       Yeah.

    9. SGSarah Guo51:22

       Yeah.

    10. ITIsaiah Taylor51:23

        So it, it comes from a s- a very similar, uh, argument that I was making before, where I'd watched these, uh, these startups try to get that deal right for a very long time. And frankly, there are just too many parties.

    11. SGSarah Guo51:34

        Mm-hmm.

    12. ITIsaiah Taylor51:35

        Right? There are, like, too many people and too many parties-

    13. SGSarah Guo51:37

        It's not your speed to be like, "Well, let's negotiate about this site-

    14. ITIsaiah Taylor51:40

        Yes

    15. SGSarah Guo51:40

        ... and this permit." And-

    16. ITIsaiah Taylor51:40

        Exactly. Like, yes, in theory, could we go to, you know, a hyperscaler who wants a gigawatt of power in, in a place? Like, yes, and, and certainly we will at some point. Um, but we could also just put a gigawatt on the ground, right? And we can do that on our own timing, um, at our own pace, and that pace is going to be faster than anyone else in the world.

    17. SGSarah Guo51:57

        Mm-hmm.

    18. ITIsaiah Taylor51:58

        Um, and, and then it, the question flips around, which is if I have, you know, a gigawatt of power with land and fiber, is someone gonna put a data center there? It's like, yes, absolutely, right? Um, and so yeah, I think, like, in the long term, we'll maybe s- start to do some of these deals where, uh, a dedicated customer wants their own giga-site for their hypercluster or something like that. Um, but it'll be driven by speed even in that case, right? We'll go to the customers who say, um, you know, "And we want it delivered in a year," right? Not the customers who say, "Oh, we're thinking about this in three to four years." So really speed and scale. I- if you-- Honestly, if you ask me any question and you keep digging back, you will find speed and scale. Like, that really is what nuclear is missing. It's missing its, its Ford moment, its Toyota moment, its SpaceX moment, where you have a company that realizes that the actual thing that nuclear is missing is scale deployment, and, and that's really what we care about. And so the giga-site, you know, we've got a site here, we're gonna build more reactors here. We have a, uh, a planned giga-site nearby. We get to go with conviction, build power. Um, and yes, I'm absolutely confident that load will follow.

    19. SGSarah Guo53:10

        How do you,

20. 53:11 – 55:37

    CEO Tick Rate

    1. SGSarah Guo53:11

       um... If you just think of your primary objectives as speed and scale-

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor53:14

       Yes

    3. SGSarah Guo53:15

       ... given safety, right?

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor53:16

       Yeah.

    5. SGSarah Guo53:16

       Um, how do you, like, drive that personally as CEO?

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor53:20

       Mm-hmm.

    7. SGSarah Guo53:20

       Like, what do you wake up every day and, like, think about problems to solve or what to focus on?

    8. ITIsaiah Taylor53:24

       Yeah. This is one of those things that I think is the m- probably the most irreplaceable attribute of a company is its internal pace. We call it tick rate.

    9. SGSarah Guo53:32

       Mm-hmm.

    10. ITIsaiah Taylor53:33

        That's a sort of a metric that we've designed around going critical in, in new systems, but you could probably translate that to any, uh, industry. You know, in software it's probably something like, you know, new, uh, continuous integration builds per hour or something like that. But, um, I think it's the hardest thing to replicate. You have to start it from the first day of the company. Um, it has to come from the CEO, and the first five team members have to have it deep in their bones. The first 20 team members have to have it deep in their bones. They have to be trained that when they hire people, they're looking for that in their, you know, in those people's bones. Um, and that's also not enough. Also, once you're in that setup, I have to constantly, and I-- this is really what I do, go around the organization and speed things up, right? You know, continuously ask, uh... My chief of staff's laughing over here 'cause she's seen this happen many times. Um, you know, I go, I go war mode on things, right? So, like, look around and like, "Okay, that's going slow," and we will, we will set up a, a literal war room, and I guess not literal war room, but we'll set up a physical war room, um, and we will say, "How do we turn a six-month timeline into a four-week timeline?" Right? And maybe we'll hit eight weeks, right, but it's not six months. Um, and I, I think I've realized, like, there is no autopilot for that. There's no automatic mode that makes a company faster inherently. There are lots of things you can do to set it up for success, um, but-

    11. SGSarah Guo55:00

        But you have to push

    12. ITIsaiah Taylor55:01

        ... you will always, I will always have to push, and I will always push. And it's because, um, I know that the physics are here Right? I know that energy will be a thousand times cheaper than it is today. I know that nuclear fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. Somebody will do that, and it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's gonna be in the future decades or the future centuries because that time is up to us, right? It's up to us how quickly we go down that path, how quickly we make energy more abundant, um, and that feeds into everything else. So it's, it's highly motivating for us, um, and we are, are tackling it as fast as we can.

    13. SGSarah Guo55:36

        People

21. 55:37 – 1:01:27

    Abundant Energy and Hyper-Techno Industrialism

    1. SGSarah Guo55:37

       in their daily lives thinking about what happens for them if this works-

    2. ITIsaiah Taylor55:41

       Yeah

    3. SGSarah Guo55:42

       ... and you get very cheap, abundant nuclear energy.

    4. ITIsaiah Taylor55:44

       Yep.

    5. SGSarah Guo55:44

       Like, imagine that future for us.

    6. ITIsaiah Taylor55:48

       Energy is the fundamental input to, uh, the quality of human life. Uh, if you look backward into time and say, "How did humanity go from one standard of living to the next?" It's always unlocked by cheaper energy, right? So when we went from essentially a solar-powered world, which is what we were in Agrarian Age, um, like literally human muscles were solar powered because you were either eating plants or eating animals, and both of those things were essentially, um, chemical energy that is built up by the energy of the sun through photosynthesis. Um, life was hard, right? Life was really, really hard. Um, when we got into underground hydrocarbons, you had this massive, uh, explosion of quality of life, right? Where we have, you know, heat in the winter, and we have AC in the summer, um, where we're able to drive cars to get to the hospital. Um, even really simple things. You know, we're in a, an aluminum strut building right now. Um, every one of these, these struts that you can see behind us are made of aluminum. There was a time when aluminum was considered a precious metal, um, where kings would literally make jewelry out of aluminum because it was that rare. And the thing that changed it to a literally structural metal that we make buildings out of, uh, is energy becoming cheaper, right? We figured out, you know, Charles Hall here in the United States figured out aluminum electrolysis, um, and cheap enough energy means that you can actually just separate that oxide from the aluminum, uh, and you can have pure aluminum metal. Um, and that is, that is entirely downstream of, of energy. So I would say the, the standard of living that we enjoy today is entirely downstream of the fact that we figured out you can make pretty cheap energy with hydrocarbons. Now, our goal is not pretty cheap energy. It's insanely cheap energy, and that's gonna be unlocked by, by nuclear. Um, what it will look like, I think, is fundamentally unpredictable, but I, I have a few ideas. Um, first of all, I'm very, very excited about transportation. Um, like if you think about the fundamental limits of why is it that I can't go see Grandma every week, you know, on a plane? Like, why is it just so hard to do? Why is it so expensive? Why is it so complicated? It really just comes down to the fact that we've kinda squeezed as much juice out of jet fuel as we can, right? It, it's just hard to imagine jet fuel getting 10 times cheaper than it is today, uh, and it's polluting the environment and all of these different things. Um, if you could make energy 10 times cheaper, um, then you probably could go visit Grandma every other day. You know, just on a, on a Saturday, it takes 30 minutes, and, you know, she lives across the country, but you, you go and visit her on the weekend. I'm very excited about m- what I would call, uh, hyper-techno industrialism. This is a term I invented for-

    7. SGSarah Guo58:28

       Okay. Haven't heard it.

    8. ITIsaiah Taylor58:29

       Yeah. Um, for basically everything becoming free. Uh, it, it-- this sounds like I'm, I'm talking sci-fi here, but, like, an approximation of this will happen. Um, I'm-- Let me put out a thought experiment for you. So, uh, let's take a, a, a physical good that's manufactured today, right? Let's, let's take this microphone. So this microphone came from a factory, and the factory had, um, sort of three inputs, right? It had people in the factory that are working on it, assembling things. It had input materials, right? And I would include in those input materials, you know, the plastic on here and this foam thing. Also the machines, right, that, you know, maybe injection molded that plastic. And then the last thing it consumed was energy, right? So energy is one of the three things that made this. What's interesting is, um, with the introduction of AI, we're actually converting the human input element to energy, right? So instead of, uh, a person having to pick something up and put it onto the next tray, right, you're going to have a robot pick something up, put it on, onto the next tray, and consume energy, right? Um, and instead, that human will be able to coordinate hundreds of robots, right? So their personal output will go from picking up an object and putting it onto a tray to essentially picking up 100 objects and putting it onto 100 trays, and the trade-off we're making there is that we're increasing the consumption of energy. Now, you could still say, "Okay, but you are consuming physical inputs." What's interesting about that, though, is let's dig into that, all right? So there were some physical m- inputs and some machines that went into that factory. Well, where did those come from, right? Those don't grow on trees. Those also came from factories. And you can ask the same question. What went into that factory? W- It was energy, it was machines, and it was people, right? Apply the same rubric, and you realize, okay, actually, it's really just machines and energy. Well, where did those machines come from? If you keep asking this question, what you realize is energy is the fundamental input. When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi-autonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things, right? The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it. And to the extent that we can make energy 10 times cheaper and then 10 times cheaper, uh, that is the extent to which we will be able to make basically everything free. Um, and that's very exciting to me, uh, because if we're going to go explore the stars and we're gonna set up, you know, a, a place for us to live on Mars and explore the universe, we're gonna need a lot of stuff, and it's gonna be... I- It's gonna need to be a lot cheaper than it is right now. Uh, so that's very exciting to me.

    9. SGSarah Guo1:01:03

       Exciting to me too. That's a great place to end. Thanks, Isaiah.

    10. ITIsaiah Taylor1:01:05

        Thanks so much for having me.

    11. SGSarah Guo1:01:08

        Find us on Twitter at NoPriorsPod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you wanna see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way, you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.

Episode duration: 1:01:26