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?
00:25:05 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:25:05] S1: Yeah. So there's a lot of extraordinary engineering projects that go on in the world and in in The United States. Rockets are insanely hard. Rockets are, like, legitimately wildly difficult pieces of technology and engineering. I think I read that the... Somebody's gonna, like, comment on YouTube about how I'm an idiot, but, like, I think I read that the Raptor thrust chamber is, like, 300 bar, something like that. That's pretty crazy. And, like, yeah, that... That's like a properly hard thing because if anything goes wrong, the whole rocket just blows up. Right? So you have like extremely high pressure systems and you're mass limited. You don't just get to like throw a bunch of mass at it. So, like rockets are properly hard. Nuclear reactors are pretty simple. You have a pressure tank, and you have a moderator inside of the tank, and you have uranium inside of the moderator. And then you basically just need a flow of working fluid and extract that heat. And what's really interesting about nuclear reactors is that they will make as much heat as you pull out of them. Super counterintuitive thing that I find that even people in nuclear don't actually have a counterintuitive... Or don't have an intuitive feeling of this, but nuclear reactors will just make whatever power you pull out. So if you're able to flow a fluid through a reactor core at a higher and higher speed, it will match the amount of power, because reactors have a, what's called a thermal feedback of reactivity. So if you flow more fluid through the core, it will drop the temperature and the reactivity will go up. And so really the task is just flow fluid through a nuclear core. Now there's all sorts of things you have to do to make sure that it's safe, and make sure you get it right. A lot of those things you can actually just address in the design space, but from a mechanical perspective, this is, I would argue, simpler than a high performance engine. Like it's simpler than, you know, honestly, like a v eight engine that's in a high performance car. And especially at the scale that those are manufactured and the tolerance they're manufactured at and these sorts of things. So what's really going on here in nuclear is that you need to do all this engineering, and you need to get it right while getting like 10 other things right. And that's where it's like the complexity, right?