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.
00:35:01 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:35:01] S0: Yesterday, you were talking about this idea of most reactor companies are basically trying to design this beautiful thing that looks like a Ferrari. Yeah. And you're trying to design the Toyota Camry. Yes. The Toyota just makes like a million of them a year. [00:35:16] S1: Yep. [00:35:17] S0: Why is that so important?
00:35:18 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:35:18] S1: It's so important because the goal is to bring the cost of the nuclear plant down. That's the first thing that you need to do in nuclear. If you look at the cost of nuclear, right, the overarching goal of the company is that we're gonna make energy 10 times cheaper. And nuclear fission is the way to do that based on the physics. But if you look at the cost of nuclear, most of the cost is the plant itself. Right? Uranium's very cheap, operations are pretty cheap, it's actually the plant itself that costs the money. So you need to make the plant cheaper. And there's two philosophies on how you do that. One is you design this perfect machine, which makes so much power that no matter how hard it was and how complicated it was, and no matter how long it takes, was it gonna be worth it because it's gonna make 1.2 gigawatts. Right? That's that's one philosophy. The other philosophy is actually the way that you make anything cheap is you make it in a factory. Factories are places where cheap things come out. Right? The factories are buildings where things go to become free. Right? You know, and so nuclear reactors need to go to factories to become free. In a factory setting, you have the opportunity to continuously ask the question, why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? Right? In a factory setting, you have the same group of smart people on the floor watching something happen, and you know, that 22 year old kid, you know, straight out of college, who's never seen this factory line before steps in and, you know, this has happened before, and she's like, why do... What's going... Why do we do that? And then, you know, the answer's like, well, because I actually I don't know. Why do we do that? And then you chase that that thread down and realize we don't need to do this at all. Right? If you are always doing traditional style plant construction, you don't learn those lessons, because in the ten years that it took you to build the thing, half those people retired. Right? You don't even get to have those learnings. So the goal is to make nuclear reactors something that are repeatedly built, and you could start to bring these costs down, you could vertically integrate, you could do things better than you did yesterday, and that mass manufacturing is eventually how we're gonna make things cheap.