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?
00:31:17 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:31:17] S1: Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. Other nuclear companies have many different types of business models and partnerships and places that they want to play in the stack. Our responsibility as a company is to make energy as cheap as we possibly can. I want to make energy 10 times cheaper than it is today, and then I wanna make it 10 times cheaper again after that. And that is a responsibility that we take seriously. We don't get to say, oh, sorry, the reactor's not gonna get any cheaper because that pump just, you know, those suppliers just charge a lot of money for that pump. Like, we don't get to make that excuse. We go make the pump if that's the case, right? A good example of this is our control rod drive units. So control rods are tough, they're really important, it's super important that you be able to shut down a nuclear reactor and on command, and so this is like super important stuff to get right. And the normal way to deal with this is that you go buy control rod drive units and control rods, because there are vendors out there who have built them, and when we went out to the market and we said, hey, we need to buy some control rod drive units and some control rods, we got quotes back that said eighteen months and twenty four months and thirty six months, and we came back and we said, well, this plant needs to turn on in a year, and so that's not happening. And not only that, but they can't get delivered the day the reactor's supposed to turn on. There's gotta be some integration and tests. And so we ended up making the Control units ourselves, and we expected it to be very hard, and it was very hard. We went through, I mean, probably 40 major iterations of those control ajive units, running them thousands of times up and down in our helium pressure chamber. We have a test stand back in Hawthorne that we can get up to full nuclear temperatures and pressures in helium, and, I mean, that thing is just running up and down day and night, and we're discovering failure modes, and we're discovering wear patterns, and we're improving the design, and we're, you know, fixing the electronic system, and the motor controllers, and all this stuff that you never think about. And that really is the only way to do it. That is the only way to win, that you take responsibility for the entirety of the system.
00:33:15 · Isaiah Taylor
Another good example of this, I would say, very different from what we just talked about in technology is community engagement. So community engagement is something that we take extremely seriously at Valar. I would like to say, you know, just to brag on my team a little bit, I would like to say that we take community engagement 10 times more seriously than any other nuclear company. When we go and pick a place to build, we spend an inordinate amount of time on the ground with that community before we go set up shop. We get to know people, we get to know the city council, you know, half this, you know, the people sitting in that office over there, like know the city council by name and the neighbors by name and the people in the community and the business leaders, and they've been to the meetings and they've hosted the cookouts. And again, we're not showing up to say, hey, like, here's this company, you should get to know us because we're building a nuclear reactor in your backyard. We say, what do you guys think about building a nuclear reactor here, would you like that? Here's the costs. Here's the benefits. We think that the benefits are enormous. But honestly, we're also a startup and we could fail. Like, we could run out of money. That's very possible. And and so, you know, you could help us out for the next year and we could go bankrupt and you know, all those jobs that you thought were going come out of that might not happen. Right? We're going to be honest about that. But if it works out, like this could be a really exciting thing for your community. What do you think about that? And that has paid dividends for us. But if we kind of went into this with an attitude of, you know, we just make the reactors. Right? We're just reactor guys. That's what we do. We we just make reactors. You know, we would have gotten slapped down. Right? So you have to you have to look at the entire picture and the goal is make the cheapest energy that we can. And anything that falls under that scope, anything that blocks, you know, that pathway is our responsibility to fix.