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.
00:37:30 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
So once you've decided that that's what you're gonna do, well, how do you design the reactor? And the answer is that you should trade off everything for simplicity and safety. I really believe that's the answer. You can trade off efficiency, you can trade off power density, you can trade off some aspects of size, but you cannot trade off simplicity or safety because those are the two things that are going to allow you to mass replicate. And the mass replication is fundamentally what will allow us to take nuclear from an industry that builds nuclear reactors for $7,000 a kilowatt to $15,000 a kilowatt, all the way down to 1,000, and then even below that. [00:38:07] S0: Jeff Bezos has this awesome line where he compares like one way doors versus two way doors, one way doors, you walk through it and you can't walk back out. [00:38:13] S1: Yeah. [00:38:13] S0: Two way doors, you walk through and you can walk back and it's no no problem. [00:38:17] S1: Yep. [00:38:17] S0: For the one way door decisions that you're making, how do you kind of make those decisions and make sure that it doesn't completely fuck up your timelines and critical path?
00:38:25 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:38:25] S1: Yep. This is something I've actually thought about for a long time. I I guess I read that on social media like eight or nine years ago when that was sort of going around as a basis, and I'm very grateful to him for it because it's a really good framework, and the idea here is that you run as fast as you can through two way doors, and you take your time and deliberate on one way doors. Super useful framework for making decisions. The problem is, we also have to run really fast through the one way doors. We are at the place that we are at as a company because we have sprinted through some one way doors. And, you know, there's a bit of instinct here and just, you know, make it work. That's happened. I think a lot of it is you have to think all the way back to the fundamentals. I think that people don't really read laws that much. Like, don't really read laws and regulations, but you can read this stuff, right? Like, it's out there. And actually, now there's like Claude, so you can even go faster with, you know, OpenAI and Claude and ChatGPT and these things. But even before that, you know, the laws were out there and the regs were out there, you can go and read them. And there's a lot of stuff that you can just boil down to the fundamentals of like, why can't we do this faster? And you read the regs and it's like, well, actually the regs say you can, or they don't say you can't, but people just kinda haven't been. And actually, I'll say one big advantage that Valar has is we don't flinch when it comes to risking large amounts of capital on things that really matter. I'm really giving away some of the secrets right now, but I don't think that anyone is going to, you know, suddenly overnight gather the risk tolerance that we have in this area, so I could say it out loud, but...
00:40:08 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:40:08] S0: As someone that also risks a huge amount of capital with... [00:40:11] S1: Yeah. Listen, man, like, have to you have to swing big. And when you're working on a problem of this importance, right, I genuinely believe that this team is working on the most important problem in the world. We are working on making energy 10 times cheaper. It's hard to imagine a more important problem than that. When you're working on a problem like that, you're gonna have to take some big swings. And some of those swings are gonna be zero or one swings where, you know, if you spent $40,000,000 on that site and it didn't work out, you're out of the game. Right? But guess what? I took that swing and, you know, another party didn't, and now they're behind. Right? So that is... It's a it's a high stakes game, but you have to play it. Right? And especially if you want to build the most important things in the world, like if you want to actually change the nature of how humanity consumes energy, and you can't get yourself over that level of decision making, and aren't ready to just absolutely barrel through a couple one way doors, you know, I'm gonna go faster than you. [00:41:13] S0: If you are full steaming it through all these one way doors, you also have to be incredibly good at basically pulling rabbits out of hats. [00:41:20] S1: Oh, [00:41:21] S0: yeah. When things don't work. Yes. And so what are the best examples of you pulling rabbits out of a hat, and how do you actually do that?
00:41:29 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:41:29] S1: Alright. So a lot of the the rabbits that we've been able to pull out of hats, obviously can't talk about. There's some amazing stories that we'll tell someday, but one that that I will talk about, just one small example, it was very important to us to demonstrate that we could move this reactor via c 17. We built it to be containerized, we built it under the weight specs of the maximum load of a c 17, we engineered the plant to be able to take those g loads and stresses, but none of this matters if you don't actually fly it, so we were like, we want to actually fly this thing. And we went, you know, we spent a lot of time with the Department of War on the logistics of how that's gonna work, We did a bunch of studies with them on the loads of a C-seventeen and worked with load masters on, okay, what is this plant going to experience in flight? We did engineering studies on our side to figure out, is the plant going to survive the transportation? Know, we had people, you know, who were worried for us in the Department of Energy that, are you sure you guys really want to fly this thing because, like, we don't want this plant to break and you're part of our pilot program, like, we want you guys to do a critical, like, that would, you know, if you, you know, snap an important component, and we're like, yep, we know, but listen, this is a really important thing for us to demonstrate that we can do this. So we get through all this work, right, and it's months of analysis, months of engineering, reengineering on the plant, refabrication of things that weren't going to take the G loads, you know, hundreds of people within the Department of War that coordinated that operation, and we get to three days left until we fly. Right? The Secretary of Energy is gonna be flying with us, the Under Secretary of War is gonna be flying with us, the CTO of The United States is gonna be flying with us, We have some senators on board. We're meeting the governor down there. The stakes are pretty high. Right? We get a call from the loadmaster at the base where we're gonna take off from, and he says, guys, the loader truck that is supposed to load your reactor onto the C 17 cannot take the loads of this vessel. Your vessel is too heavy for the loader truck. And I think this is actually two days before.