00:00:00 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: Today I'm sitting down with Isaiah Taylor, the founder of Valar Atomics, at their first reactor test site in Utah. Twelve months ago, there was nothing here. Now there's a massive reactor in our background, and in about three or four weeks, this thing is gonna go critical, I believe, for the first time. [00:00:14] S1: That's the goal. Yeah. And actually in September, there was nothing here. This was a bare patch of dirt in September. We released a video of us doing a groundbreaking and doing some bedrock blasting, and and now we're sitting here in front of what we hope will be the first advanced reactor to make power in American history. So it's it's been a wild nine months. [00:00:32] S0: This is a fascinating problem because up until now, it's just basically in this R and D phase of getting through regulatory hurdles and making sure that the thing actually works. And then as soon as you turn it on, it turns into a manufacturing problem, and you have to then scale to like, you know, we were at your next facility today where you're gonna try to build like a 100 a year. So what does the scale up look like? What does that ramp look like?
00:00:52 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:00:52] S1: Yeah. You know, would relate this a lot to the Falcon Nine actually. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to build a reactor which is easy to replicate. It's a little bit different from mass manufacturing. Right? Different from like a Tesla style problem, more like a SpaceX style problem. So you have a complicated vehicle that you need to get really good at building in a repeatable fashion and deploying in a repeatable fashion, but it's not like mass production. Right? So that's a really unique area and I actually think it's an area that we can be uniquely good at. In The United States, we have some really talented people who work on objects of about this size and very similar manufacturing methods, and we've actually designed the reactor around that. So when I first started the company, we actually didn't have a size in mind for the first reactor. It was very explicit, we told the team we don't know how big the reactor is, we don't know how powerful it is. We didn't know those numbers until probably a year to eighteen months into the company. We told ourselves we are going to discover the power level through the manufacturing process. So we're gonna go out to how do you build a reactor that's easy to build? How do we use supply chains that already exist? How do we use tooling that already exists? And that will yield a certain size and a certain shape, and then you work backwards through normal core power density to a power output. And, you know, our our instinct was as long as that number turns out to be somewhere above 15 megawatts, we should be pretty good for mass production. If you're under 15 megawatts, it's pretty hard to scale the right way. You just end up doing so many different pieces of operations and it becomes more complicated, but our feeling is above the 15 megawatt breakpoint, you have something that can really scale, and we think this ends up somewhere around 25 megawatts. So 25 megawatts being that that sort of scale factor, if you want a gigawatt, you do 40 of them. So, you know, the next challenge for us to figure out as we turn this on and turn the next one on and turn the next one on is how do we get to the place where we are turning on a reactor every day, and then multiple reactors every day? And that's how we're gonna climb into the gigawatts. It's not gonna be these really large scale plants.
00:02:58 · Ty Morse
[00:02:58] S0: What does the, like, process look like going from just the first reactor to the first, like, 10?
00:03:04 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:03:04] S1: A whole lot of pain and suffering. It's hard. Like, it's really, really hard because what you would want to do, and I think what people in the nuclear industry have tried to do, is iterate in the design and you keep trying to design better and design better and design better. You maybe even have supply chain conversations. You go out and talk to suppliers. And, you know, a few years down the road, you think you have something that's really manufacturable. But we know from experience that the first time you go to build something, it doesn't work like you designed it. Right? And your analysis was wrong in this way and that way. And guess what? The supplier that you thought was awesome turns out they didn't deliver on time or at all. Or, you know, they can only deliver half of what they thought they could and and so you end up having vertically integrated. So it's very counterintuitive, but the only way to go from one to 10 is to turn one on and then turn another one on and then try to turn on two and then try to turn on three. And through this process, you will uncover all of these things that were fundamentally unknowable. You just could not have predicted at the tenth what it would have taken to get to to the tenth. And so, you know, I think this is what sets Valar apart. This is where we're really really unique. We really... We know that we need to get to hundreds of reactors, but we know that the path to hundreds is through turning one on and getting good at that and then turning another one and and going through that, you know, that really detailed process of learning.
00:04:32 · Ty Morse
[00:04:32] S0: I don't know how people kinda came to the conclusion that iterating on paper made sense. This has not worked anywhere else, and so what do you... Like how did that happen?
00:04:41 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:04:41] S1: Yeah. You know, I think that in nuclear, it's particularly tempting because nuclear operations are really, really hard. Like it's just really hard to split an atom. Not from a technical standpoint, it's actually pretty easy to split an atom from a technical standpoint, but from the perspective of operationally being a company that can build a core, can fuel it, and then take it critical, that is actually a really, really hard thing to do in terms of making sure that your analysis systems are actually good. Right? Does your analysis lead to something that becomes real in the physical world? Do you have security? Do you have MCNA? Do you have a really good operations team that understands what they're doing? Does the regulator agree with you on all of those things? Right? So because iteration is so difficult in nuclear, people have just sort of defaulted to design. Right? Because you can do design on paper. Right? And so that's really what we've been doing. The other thing is I think that people look back to an era of nuclear where it was more possible to do some things in design land. What I mean is it... There's a certain period in in nuclear history where you had sort of like the EPC driven style of building nuclear plants, and it it kinda worked. And the reason it kinda worked was because we had already done a lot of fundamental r and d in real world tests. Right? So the Atomic Energy Commission turned on 70 different nuclear reactor prototypes, the Navy ran all of these different nuclear reactor prototypes, and then we also had a very healthy EPC industry in terms of combustion plants. Right? So gas and coal plants. And so you kind of took those two things together and you could sort of throw that into an engineering context and do some plant engineering and throw it to an EPC and you get a plant out of it. None of those things are true today. Like we haven't been turning on 70 test reactors, we don't have that huge core of people who have just turned on 70 test reactors, and we're also not very good at even building normal plants anymore. Like we don't build plants at the speed that we should, at the scale that we should, We don't build bridges as fast as we used to. We don't build dams and highways and all these other works of civil infrastructure.