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?
00:27:27 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
You have to get the you have to get the the regulatory really, really right. You have to get construction right. These things have to go well on a schedule. And in the face of all of that, have to operate in an industry that just doesn't believe in going fast anymore. That is one of the biggest challenges that we face every single day is like, I love the nuclear industry. I've been, you know, watching, you know, heroes move in the nuclear industry for decades, and a lot of those heroes really dislike me. Like, really genuinely genuinely dislike me. [00:28:00] S0: This almost sounds like the Elon thing where he talked with, like, I think some astronauts or something, and [00:28:05] S1: they were like [00:28:06] S0: private, you know, commercial space shouldn't exist.
00:28:08 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:28:08] S1: Yep. Yep. One of my heroes as well, actually. A couple of my heroes in the Apollo missions really, really disliked Elon as well, though I I think they made up eventually, which is great. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the nature of any very, like, disruptive mover in technologies that the the existing people there are not gonna get what you're doing. And I would just appeal to the past, right? I would look back to the early days of nuclear and say, the first nuclear projects were very rapid. Right? They were safe, but they were fast. So Chicago pile one, Chicago pile two, x 10, all of the work at Oak Ridge where my great grandfather was, these things did not take five years or ten years or fifteen years. And obviously there were some mistakes made in the early nuclear program, you had some fatal accidents with plutonium at Los Alamos. Those had more to do with the weapon side and less to do with the reactor side. You had SL1 in Idaho, so there have been fatal incidents and you do have to take nuclear safety very seriously, you have to take industrial safety very seriously, but this is not unlike other industries. Right? Rockets also explode, you know, cars crash when you're doing test drives. And so it's a it's part of the category of humans build difficult things and we deal with kinetic systems and we've overcome hard challenges. So, you know, slow and safe are not the same same thing. Right? In fact, I would argue that the faster that an industry moves, the safer it can become. Because if you have a fast moving industry, it can push through all of these questions that they resolve in a safer way, right? So you say, how do we make this pump safer? Well, your speed of iteration is going to determine whether or not you get to answer that question. And once you know the answer to that question, your speed of iteration is going to impact whether or not you actually get to deploy that in the field. Right? So a good example of that, this plant back here, I would argue this is orders of magnitude safer than the other nuclear power plants in The United States that are light water plants. Now light water plants are still very, very safe to be clear, but this one's like orders of magnitude safer. And as a company that is moving quickly, if we're able to move fast enough, we actually get to go deploy that and that makes everyone safer. Right?
00:30:24 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
The fact that we get to take this safer technology to market is a function of our speed and that will make everyone safer. So slow and safe are simply not the same thing. [00:30:35] S0: Yeah. Think it goes from effectively, like, the safest thing is just no thing, and then if you're gonna have something, the safest thing is you do it a whole lot and you get really really good at it because you're it brings so much. [00:30:44] S1: That's a good way to put it. Yeah. Once you've decided that you need energy, which we do need energy, then doing it often and doing it iteratively and rapidly is actually the safest way to do it. [00:30:56] S0: Yesterday, I was talking with you and I kinda gave this analogy of some of the other companies are basically kicking a ball into a goal. And you're trying to play the entire game of soccer. Yes. Because if you just learn how to kick the ball into the goal, you're missing a lot of it. [00:31:09] S1: A 100%. [00:31:10] S0: Yeah. Why is it so important to just vertically integrate basically the entire business and make sure that Valar Atomics is just running the entire operation?