01:25:56 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:25:56] S1: Yeah. So the most fundamental answer here is that we keep the overall pace of the organization very high. Right? Because if you have an organization pace that's extremely high, you will be able to figure out a lot of different ways to succeed. Right? And and some things that look like, you know, irreducible bottlenecks, you could figure out a way around, you could engineer a way around, etcetera. But the other thing is is what I said before, which is to think about the end state. Like, what has to be true for us to have a million reactors? Like, I think about that concretely all the time. Like, there's decisions made in this plant, in this room, that look weird, until you think about like, well, we're trying to do that a million times, like, and and this, obviously, this plant is not ready for that, this one's not ready to be made a million times, but we learned some lessons on this that will contribute to doing this a million times. And so, yeah, you you have to think backwards from, like, what needs to be true for this for this to to take place, and and then the other thing is, like, you have to have a certain amount of paranoia. Like, I have a hard time going to sleep at night, thinking about all the different possible bottlenecks it might present, and, like, that's the downside of being a founder, like, just... You're gonna have to do that.
01:27:07 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[01:27:07] S0: When we were walking through, you said, you know, for this one, we are gonna have all the wires underneath the floor Yep. But for future ones that we want it to just be modular, so you can just plop this crate down and suddenly it all fits together and [01:27:18] S1: Yep. [01:27:18] S0: What all, like, learnings have you have you gotten from this initial facility? [01:27:22] S1: Yeah. I mean, we've had thousands of of things that we've learned here. I mean, honestly, really simple things about, like, how do we serialize concrete versus MEP versus plant production. Right? Like, how do you do these things in the right order and do them extremely fast? Like, we built this really fast. Right? This was a bare patch of dirt in September. But we now know how to do it a lot faster. And when we go and do that, we're gonna do it again. There are not too many things that I can say specifically here yet because they are really, really valuable, honestly. Like, these these lessons, these, like, painful lessons we've learned, like, are our moat, and they're the value of the company. [01:28:08] S0: Let's say everything works, and you're ready to scale to a gigasite, and you're putting, a thousand of these things on a little plot of land. [01:28:14] S1: Yeah. [01:28:15] S0: How do you actually do that? What does that look I [01:28:17] S1: actually don't think it works that way, by the way. [01:28:18] S0: Okay.
01:28:19 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:28:19] S1: Like what you're saying, we're like, oh, now I'm ready to scale. Like, it's so more it's so much more organic than that, and it's so much more driven by the regular pace of the organization. Like, I don't think you'll be able to to say at a certain point, like, oh, now you're scaling. Like, we're scaling right now. Right? Like, we built a reactor. We're about to turn it out. It's gonna make power. We're about... We're gonna do it again. We're gonna do it again. We're gonna do it And the tick rate of the organization will get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And soon the tick... You know, at some point the tick rate will be an hour, and then it'll be a minute. Right? And we'll be building millions of reactors. So, you I feel like I've spent a long time talking about other people's mistakes, and that's only because the mistakes I've made are very precious to me, and I don't want to reveal these secrets. But this is something I think the nuclear industry does too much is they're like, oh, we're gonna do all this engineering and design, and then we'll scale. It's like, no. If you aren't already in the process of building a reactor and then another one and then another one, you have not started the work of scaling yet. Scaling is a thing you do. It's a thing that your organization does. It's not a thing that you can design to and then start doing one day. It's a thing you're doing or you're not. It's a thing that's in your DNA or not. And, you know, I would say that Valar has been just built from the first day of the company to do that.
01:29:44 · Ty Morse
[01:29:44] S0: Let's end it on what does July 4 of this year signify?
01:29:48 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:29:48] S1: I think that July 4 will be a rebirth for the nuclear industry in The United States. It's not just symbolic. Obviously, it's the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States. It's the deadline for the July 4 reactor program, the nuclear pilot program created by EO one four three zero one. But there's something so important about plants getting built in the physical world. It's so much harder, and it's so much more impactful. Right? Like, I wanna be clear. People have designed much better reactors than this. Right? There have been many, many smart teams, over the last twenty years in startups and other companies who have designed much better plants than this, but this plant will have a bigger impact because it's real and it exists. And this is the fundamental cultural divide between us and everyone else, is that we value a small reactor making a 100 kilowatts of power infinitely more than the best possible design. Infinitely more. One reactor splitting atoms, making a small amount of power, making gamma rays that we actually had to deal with the reality of of is infinitely more meaningful to us. So I think the meaning of what's gonna happen in July 4 is we're gonna... The United States is gonna be back in the business of doing that. Right? Not just my company, you know, others who are working on zero power criticalities, are also important, like the one we did back in November, these are important steps. We're gonna be back in in the the business of splitting atoms again. And actually doing that in real life is the bottleneck on doing it a million times and to producing the amount of power that we're gonna need to do all the things that we care about as a country and to make energy as cheap as we possibly can.