01:08:20 · Isaiah Taylor
When those pumps fail, for instance, in Fukushima, the backup generators were flooded from a tsunami, right, the cooling pumps fail, the heat starts to build up because you still have fission product decay heat, and eventually those temperatures exceed the structural temperatures in the core, and you have any number of things happen including the pressure boundary can get breached due to high temperatures and you can have steam escape that's radioactive and all these sorts of things. So how do we avoid that? Well, when I said at the beginning that this plant is a 100 times safer than existing nuclear power plant, what I mean is, we already talked about thermal runaway, right, so this is a very strongly negative thermal feedback of reactivity, but it is also incapable of meltdown through decay heat, and what that means is there's a certain amount of decay heat in the core, but the reactor's also just really small, and it's made of graphite. And the fact that it's small and made of graphite are massive advantages. The first advantage is being made of graphite. Graphite has very high thermal inertia. So as this decay heat gets released from the fission products, it starts heating up the graphite, and it turns out that most of the decay heat is actually just going to get absorbed in getting the graphite hotter, because it takes a huge amount of energy to heat graphite up, and so a lot of the decay heat in a graphite reactor gets absorbed with just making the graphite hotter. By the way, graphite has a melting point, it actually doesn't melt, it sublimates, but it has a sublimation point of around 3,000 degrees Celsius. So it can get extraordinarily hot. The other important aspect of this is that we use a fuel called triso. So Triso is a particular fuel that can get extremely hot without compromising itself. So normal nuclear fuel can't get that hot before it starts to crack and leak and eventually burst, and you have fission products leaking around inside the reactor. Triso can get very, very hot before it gets compromised, over 2,000 degrees. And so the combination of these things means in a shutdown scenario, the core can just get really hot, and that's actually just fine, that's okay. And a lot of the k heat is taken care of by just allowing the core heat up. And then the last thing is the size of the reactor.
01:10:35 · Isaiah Taylor
The reactor being very small means that we have a high surface area to volume ratio. As a cylinder gets bigger, the walls of a cylinder, the surface area of a cylinder scales with the square, whereas the volume of cylinder scales with the cube. Right? So what that means is a really big cylinder has a small surface area and a huge volume, and a small cylinder has the opposite. Right? So what this is behind us is a small cylinder. What that means is we actually have a lot of surface area, and ultimately the heat from the decay products just escape through the walls of the vessel passively. Right? They just get convected and radiated from the walls of the vessel. And the combination of all of these three factors means if we were to have a circulator shut off of our reactor, exactly like Fukushima, what would happen is that the core would slowly heat up, heat would start escaping out the sides of the vessel, it would get to an equilibrium temperature, which is below the temperatures at which nuclear fuel would be compromised, or where the graphite would be compromised, and then it would start to taper off. And what's awesome about Valar is that that statement is not a theoretical statement. That is something that we've tested in real life. We had this exact reactor built exactly as it is in Los Angeles, we even built a fake building around the vessel to mimic this nuclear shield and to mimic the Citadel, and we insulated it with three times the amount of insulation that you would have in this concrete citadel, and we did exactly that. We actually ran the plant at full temperatures for about a week, and then we actually have a video of this, we turned off all safety systems. We just shut everything off, and we had temperature sensors inside the core and on the exterior of the vessel, and we said, let's see if what we've designed for actually happens. And exactly what I said happened, the temperature rose, it reached an equilibrium point where the temperatures are very stable, where there's heat being slowly, passively removed from the vessel walls, and then over about a two day period, the heat, the temperature fell again. So really what all of this leads to is that when we talk about nuclear safety in the terms of the plants that Valar Atomics builds, it's not engineering safety, it's physics safety. Right? The safety of our plant comes from physics.
01:12:53 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
It comes from the basic choices that we've made in the physics and materials and geometry of our plants, not whether or not a single pump works or a single valve works or does it get flooded or any of these things. [01:13:05] S0: So there's this amazing chart that I absolutely love looking at, which is basically the launch cadence over time, And you see effectively all of these different countries competing and The US kind of like tapers off in the early two thousands. [01:13:17] S1: Yep. [01:13:17] S0: And we stopped launching. And then suddenly you have SpaceX and they invert this entire graph and suddenly like 95% of all launches or something globally are just SpaceX launches. Yeah. And then there's, like, Rocket Lab in China. And I kind of think this is the same position that we are in right now, you know, twenty years ago is exactly what we're in right now, where there's 30 reactors getting built in China. There's, like, two getting built in The US. Yep. Except for maybe there's three now. [01:13:41] S1: Yep. [01:13:41] S0: How does the scale up look like for your reactors to get to a point where you're actually matching or exceeding the SpaceX growth rate
01:13:48 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:13:48] S1: for It's so important that people understand that these things are possible in technology, right? And I... That... It's probably one of the biggest contributions that Elon has made to mankind, is that he's given people a category for like absolutely fundamental change in the trajectory of an industry. Right? Like, I think if you ask people in the early two thousands, if you showed people that graph beforehand, they'd be just like, no. Science Right? Like, you're you're... This is just not possible. And he gave people a category for, no, no, no, this is possible. You can actually go from, you know, being the the loser in an industry as a country to, like, stratospheric change. And that is exactly what we are trying to do here. And it it flows into really every choice that that Valar has made. You know, I I like to say if you poke Valar in any place, you prick us in any place, we'll bleed scale. We have meticulously, ruthlessly engineered everything we're doing for maximum scale. And it actually goes back to the safety thing. Like, you could argue that you don't really need to make a plant this safe. One of the biggest criticisms that we get is for using Triso, because people are like, Triso's super expensive. And I'm like, well, one, we're gonna make it cheap, so that's fine. But, you know, like, it's expensive because no one makes it, right? There's like a couple companies that are starting to get back into it, and they'll scale, and we'll keep buying it, and it'll get cheap, right? So I don't think that's a big problem. But deeper and more fundamental point is like, if you're serious about scaling nuclear to the inflectionary degree that we believe is possible, your plants really should be unbelievably safe. Like, it's just gonna be simpler and faster for us to scale with extreme safety. Because extreme safety means that you can simplify operations, can simplify manufacturing, you can broaden your supply chain, you can do all of these things that are impossible if you have to have a, you know, accept a high level of hazard. So we are serious as a company about building tens of thousands of reactors, eventually hundreds of thousands of reactors, if that's the case, these things need to be really, really safe. So, you know, one of the things that I've noticed is people don't do things that they believe are impossible. Right?
01:16:10 · Isaiah Taylor
Like belief is is a prerequisite, even if it's a bit of suspended disbelief. Right? But like you have to have some degree or some manner of belief order to do something. And I'm okay with suspended disbelief. You know, I think there's plenty of people that we hired in the early days who I was like, you know, we're gonna go build a reactor, and it's gonna turn on Budget July 4. And, like, maybe? Like, we'll see. And hey, you know, we're we're a month and a half out. We still got a lot to get right before that thing turns on. But I think over time, it's acceptable to to suspend disbelief for a while, and then you and you watch it happen. But in that suspension of disbelief, and in these beliefs of being able to build tens of thousands, you have to make real trade offs for that outcome. Right? And a good example of that is Triso. Another good example of that is using a low power density format reactor. Right? An HDGR is not a high power density reactor. But it's so simple that we can build thousands of them. And I believe that building thousands is essentially the only thing that will matter. Right? That and pace. Right? Doing it fast and doing it many times is is in the long term, and by long term, I mean five to ten years, the only thing that will matter. And in order to do that, you have to have some simplicity and you have to have safety, which leads you to a high temperature gas reactor. It leads you to pure graphite, trisofuel, helium coolant, and the approximate size that we're that we're talking about here. So, yeah, scale, I think, is is a thing that humans in general don't have a good intuition for. Like, it's just hard for us to imagine something going from zero to one to a thousand to 10,000 to a 100,000 to a million, And I just think about the million a lot. Like, it's just something that, like, keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning. I want to get to the millionth reactor very badly.
01:18:07 · Ty Morse
[01:18:07] S0: If you had to, like, self analyze and think about the way that you think versus how other people think, what is the biggest difference between those things? I have