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.
00:06:53 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
And so assuming that we could sort of go back to building nuclear the way that we were in the sixties and seventies just is not true. And so really how we have to build nuclear now is the way that you'd build any other deep technology category, which is it has to be iterative. You have to get a group of smart people together in a room. You have to start in hardware. You have to build as quickly and safely as you can and get real world data. And it really is the only way and you will quickly learn from that. And you'll learn lessons that no matter how smart the other guys are, they will just never learn those lessons. Right? Like without the hardware, they just will not discover, you know, the the painful lessons that we've learned in this plant. [00:07:37] S0: What are a few of the things that you had on paper, you thought things were gonna work, and then you, like, have contact with reality and everything gets fucked?
00:07:44 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:07:44] S1: Yeah. I mean, you know, there's like so many of these examples, and you know, probably some of the things I'm about to say will go try the other way, and then we'll discover that it's even more painful to do the other way, so I'm even hesitant to even say some of these things, but like, a good example here is this, even the story behind this citadel here, we had originally thought, okay, we're gonna have to go to modular construction on our nuclear shielding eventually because you really don't wanna be casting on sight. Like when we get to scaled production of nuclear reactors and we want to turn on a reactor every day, we can't be pouring concrete and doing rebar work and form work before we go and turn a reactor on. So we have to get to modular shielding. And, you know, three months into the process of figuring out how do we actually make modular shielding, we're like banging our heads against the wall, and we're like, this is impossible, like this is, we've given ourselves an impossible challenge, and so I directed the team, like, screw this, we're not doing modular shielding this time, like, let's figure out... Just pour it in place, right, like, you know, we'll tackle that later. And we spent a couple weeks, like, figuring out how to pour in place, and we realized, oh, that will add two months to schedule. Like, we'll actually just add two months where we can't do anything because we're doing rebar and we're doing formwork and then we're pouring and the reactor's supposed to be inside and we're supposed to be doing wiring. And so then we actually came back to modular modular shielding again and ran into the 16,000 extremely hard things that it took to get this right where we don't have to grout this shielding. Like, that's an extraordinary thing. The fact that we can actually stack this shielding up with the crane, we've got an overhead crane here and we just place those blocks, they don't connect together, we don't have, you know, like bolts that that bolt into each other, we don't have grout, it's just stacked. And that was extremely difficult to get right. And, you know, our engineers have, like, 15 different things, you know, we all have 15 different things in our heads that we had to run into into a brick wall and then work our way around it. And, you know, I I just think about if you were to try to design this on paper, and we did.