00:56:39 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
The whole the whole team and the whole company has to think this way all the time, and it's very uncomfortable. It's weird to think this way. You wanna just think in in your own box. You wanna think in waterfalls, but you have to think holistically. Everyone has to think about the whole company and what is going to make us move the fastest. [00:56:57] S0: Initially, you were going to go to The Philippines and build some reactor out there, and then suddenly Trump gets elected, bring nuclear back to America. And then at the same time, data centers absolutely start ripping and AI takes off. What was it like kind of going through that transition inside the company? And how did you kind of like reset your own North Star in order to make sure that it was aligned?
00:57:19 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:57:19] S1: Yeah. I don't think we reset the North Star. The North Star is make energy 10 times cheaper. And The Philippines was originally the right place to go about that. And when these executive orders came out, the Department of Energy said, you know, we're open for business and we're gonna do this in a year, and that became the very obvious thing to do, and honestly, in a day we went from The Philippines is the plan to we're going to Utah. And, you know, it's just a huge credit to the team that they can roll like that because the... Again, because the North Star didn't change. Right? Because the North Star has always been we need to turn a reactor on and we need hardware experience and we need to get under pressure and we need to get at temperature and we need to be splitting atoms and we need to be making shielding and doing nuclear construction and all of these things, and so what's the fastest way to do that? That's always been the plan, and so when the conditions on the ground change, the team needs to know that you have to be able to pivot and move into whatever avenue is going to accomplish the goal the fastest. I'm sure things are gonna pivot in all sorts of unexpected ways for us right now. Right? But we will continue relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10 times cheaper.
00:58:32 · Ty Morse
[00:58:32] S0: The first time that I met you, I think I woke up. I was sleeping on top of, you know, Augustus' lab at Rainmaker. I woke up. I take off my sleep mask, and I see you walking across the floor on the phone hustling. And I'm like, this guy's crazy. And I went back to sleep, and then I woke up a little bit later, and suddenly you were going the other direction also on the phone. And I just remember that version of Isaiah, and you haven't honestly changed that much. You're still getting after it. But what has changed over the course of the last two and a half years? How has Isaiah evolved?
00:59:02 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:59:02] S1: I have come to gain massive, massive respect for amazing technology leaders and technologists in this company. It's not that, you know, it's really just like you don't know what it's gonna feel like until you do it. And to stand here and, like, look at the reactor that the team has built and to think about the insane hours and effort and blood, sweat, and tears that have been put into this, and that they just come back every single morning with energy and ambition and ready to completely rethink it when the time comes and to take the next step. Like, I don't know. It just is... I hoped to see that, but actually seeing that in your team is one of the most rewarding feelings on Earth. I had a theory about how the the nuclear industry was structured, but I wasn't sure yet. And now I'm, like, a lot more confident about it, which is that a lot of people in the nuclear industry really do wanna go fast, and they just not have been... They haven't been given the avenue to do that. I meet people in the nuclear industry all the time who, you know, look at what we're doing, you know, with with envy because they're like, I've been working for twenty years in nuclear, and I haven't seen an advanced reactor turn on yet. Right? I worked on this design. I worked on that design. I worked on this study, and you guys are about to turn one on. Right? And so I've learned that, yes, there are deep problems in how the nuclear industry is formatted, but, like, there are a huge amount of people who want to go fast. And so, you know, that's that's a powerful thing that we get to do is is unlock those people and let them run.
01:00:50 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[01:00:50] S0: It's important to talk about safety and like why... What makes reactors dangerous and also what makes like this sort of thing very safe. [01:00:59] S1: Yeah. [01:01:00] S0: Can you just talk about the like sizing and how everything works?
01:01:03 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:01:03] S1: Yeah. So there's like, let's break down what nuclear safety is and why. Fundamentally, nuclear safety is about making sure that the public and workers don't get dosed with radiation above acceptable thresholds. Everyone is always dosed with radiation all the time. You and I are currently getting dosed with radiation just because the sky is above us and the ground is beneath us and these, you know, these things are radioactive, so it's about making sure that we don't get dosed with radiation above acceptable levels. And the way that would happen in a nuclear reactor if you were not careful is that when uranium splits, it forms a variety of what we call daughter products. So a uranium atom will break apart and now you have fragments of what used to be uranium atom and is now a bunch of other random atoms. And those atoms are radioactive, they produce gamma rays. And those gamma rays at enough dose are harmful to your body and could kill you. So there's this sort of, okay, gamma rays are coming from the reactor while it's running, and so you need to make sure that you stay a certain distance from it and that you shield those rays. And then there's the issue of, and really this is what nuclear safety comes down to, how do we make sure that those fission products stay inside the reactor where they are controlled? Right? So the ultimate goal of nuclear safety is make sure that those fission products stay in a controlled state inside of the core. What you don't want is for those reactive, you know, those radioactive fission products to, you know, be distributed into the air or into the water or into the next, you know, the field next door. How do you do that? Well, there's sort of two ways that... There's two sort of aspects you have to think about in terms of nuclear safety. The first is, how do you make sure that the fission reaction itself is controlled? Right? So you... Inside of a nuclear core, have uranium, you're trying to create a chain reaction. Right? So one uranium atom splits, it creates roughly two neutrons. Those two can go cost two more fissions. Now you have four neutrons. Those four go create four fissions. Now you have eight neutrons, 16, 32, 64, 128, right? So you have an exponential growth of neutrons. And each time a fission event happens, you have heat production, and that's the principle of nuclear energy, right?