00:16:40 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:16:40] S1: I mean, yeah. It's... You know, this is a big problem in this industry. Like, we talk a big talk and then we don't ship product, and Valar needs to be different from that. And so, you know, we we actually, I think, like to understate what we're up to and focus on building. So you'll see this in the factory setting as well, we don't call what we're doing a factory. Like if you visit our facility in Hawthorne, we call it our facility. Even when we move into a much larger facility, we'll call it a facility. We won't call it a factory until it's made at least two reactors of the same type. And and that's because we really just have this focus on we have to get back to reality, we have to get back to building, and that's really what the nuclear industry has been missing. We... We've been doing all sorts of things, and we've been doing everything except just building reactors. And so that's really the first step here, and that was the goal on this reactor is what is the smallest, safest reactor that we can make that will actually make power? And you don't want it to be too small. Smallest here means it's small enough that it's easy to build and easy to transport to our test site. If you actually make it much smaller than this, reactors which are much smaller than this are actually harder to build. There's an interesting scaling law with the mean free path of a neutron, where if you try to scale reactors down, the physics gets a lot harder and the materials get a lot harder. So this is a pure graphite reactor. The the core is entirely graphite. That massively simplifies a lot of things about building a reactor and analyzing a reactor. So we basically said, okay, what's the size of the reactor that we know is small enough, that it's easy to build, it's really, really safe, and that that architecture will scale to the final size? And that's a really important part because we didn't want to build the reactor in a really different way to how we'd build the eventual full scale product. It's, you know, if if we made choices on this scale, that we'd then have to go relearn everything to go bigger, there's not a whole lot of point in that.
00:18:42 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
So this reactor size is very carefully chosen for all of the methods used to build this scale very well up to a much, much more powerful reactor, but it's small enough that it was easy for us to build quickly, it's transportable, and it's extremely safe. [00:18:57] S0: There's this kind of thing that you mentioned earlier where you want to make sure that if you're saying something is a facility versus a factory, the reason that it's a factory is because it's actually produced multiple things. I think it's really important not to lie to yourself. Other areas do people very regularly lie to themselves and maybe even you came in with those mentalities and then had to rewire your brain to say, here's the right thing to be going after?
00:19:23 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:19:23] S1: Yeah. The second part of that requires me to do some self reflection, and so it might take me a second to answer because I went into, and I'm sure there are things, but I went into this from... Honestly, would like... You you and I talked a little bit yesterday, and I told you I started this company out of frustration. Like, frustration was probably the primary emotion going into starting this company. And it was from watching startup after startup after startup, quote unquote, become a nuclear startup. Right? Like you you get some people together, you raise some money, you get out there. And I was so excited at everyone, you know, growing up in high school watching these different companies get started, and I was like, where's the reactor? And I'd check-in and I'd Google them, it's like, where's the reactor? And for some of these companies, we're ten years down the road from those, from me googling that, and there's still no reactor, right? And if I had known back then that that was gonna be the case about some of these companies, I mean, you know, I maybe would have even started this company even sooner, but I'm glad that we did when we did. But, yeah, I watched that happen enough times, I was like, okay, somebody needs to step into this with a mindset of, honestly, backing all the way up, and having a bit of humility to say, we don't really know how to build reactors in The United States Like, it looks like we do, and some EPCs do know how to build like the AP1000, but advanced reactors, SMRs, you know, which I believe is the form factor that will actually scale in how The United States works today and how we manufacture things today, we actually don't know. Like, we have designs, we have ideas, we have theories, we don't really know until we go and do it and build it. And so we just started the whole process and started the whole company with this idea that we don't really know how to build a, an SMR, don't even really know how big an SMR is, we don't know exactly what it looks like, and the manufacturing methods are gonna teach us that. And so, yeah, I think that's probably the biggest thing where people have been lying to themselves is everyone sort of thought we know how to do this. And I think this applies to many industries, but nuclear is one of the one of the worst.
00:21:36 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
But it applies to many industries that you don't really know how to do it if you haven't been doing it. And so the the shortest path is often to just start doing it. And that's that's what we've done here, and it's it's led to very, very rapid progress faster than I think a lot of people thought was was possible. [00:21:55] S0: I know when Trump got elected, things kind of flipped and in your mind you had like this opportunity that you didn't know that you were gonna have, and with the passing of the nuclear executive orders, you kind of you put, you gave yourself a deadline effectively or helped them, you know, structure it. So you gave yourself a deadline of it roughly a year. Yep. Right? How did you basically go from that to saying this is the critical path of all the, you know, steps that we have to take in the timeline at all to to actually have this powered on by July 4?
00:22:26 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:22:26] S1: Yeah. I mean, it's a great question, and critical path is something that we, like, constantly obsess over at Valar. Like, if there's one over repeated phrase at Valar, it's probably critical path. We actually designed some and built some custom software to help us try to understand this. It's still very imperfect and we still struggle to understand the the critical path, but that's like, that's actually the nature of reality is that it is very hard to understand the critical path, and you actually just need to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about it and working on it and trying to understand it at all times in order to be moving as fast as you can. I think companies are afraid to talk that way, And this is one thing that I noticed in the early days is like exploring what the critical path is makes you look stupid because it's like, bro, like, don't you know what's important to work on? And like in the early days, I felt that, like, was like, are my employees gonna think I'm dumb because I'm asking, like, what's important to work on right now? And, like, yeah, maybe they did the first five times I asked that question. Now they just think I'm annoying, which is better. But, yeah, like, we had to ask ourselves that over and over and over, and we got it wrong a bunch of times, and we got it right a bunch of times. But the fact that we we maniacally focus on it every morning and many times throughout the day, and it's what I think about morning and night and daytime is is one of the things that contributes to to the speed that we're executing at. I think when we started off, we believed that the construction was going to be the lead. I think we were surprised that a combination of building integration, let's call it that, like how the reactor actually connects to the physical plant that's here, ended up being like a lot harder than we expected, and now we know them, and now we know how to move even faster next time. There were a lot of regulatory things that I think nobody actually really knew, like even the DOE, you know, who's been an incredible partner through this process, when these executive orders came out, you know, the people in the DOE who read the president's order were like, how are we gonna do this? Like, what is our critical path to even imagining these things happening by July 4?
00:24:45 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
And so, yeah, it's been like a constant race and like the answer changes every week, but the ability of a team to focus on that is incredibly important. You said something [00:24:55] S0: on our walkout side that I thought was very interesting, was the reactor is not actually that hard to build, and like even creating fuel is not that hard to do. What is the hard thing to do?