00:09:49 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
Right? We did design this on paper a year ago, and it looks very different from how we originally designed it. And, like, could you, in theory, have gone through, like, 10 more design cycles to try to get here? Maybe. But it would have taken like years to go through those design cycles. [00:10:04] S0: A little bit more efficient to just like shoot the rocket up and see what happens.
00:10:04 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:10:04] S0: A little bit more efficient to just like shoot the rocket up and see what happens. [00:10:08] S1: Yeah. Exactly. And so in at Valar, we we have a phrase which is that steel is cheaper than software engineers. So like software engineers are actually very expensive. You think, okay, we wanna understand the nature of this problem, we wanna do a really good design, and we're gonna do that through analysis, right? If you're doing that through analysis, you're paying software engineers, and the software engineers are gonna go and, you know, come up with this perfect imperfect world model, and then they're gonna test against this world model, and you're gonna be a couple months later with an answer, and if you add up the, you know, salary cost to the people on that team over that amount of time, and then you go and say, how much steel could I have bought for that amount of money? It turns out you could buy a lot of steel for the same amount of money that you got a software answer, and for that amount, you probably could have welded it together and gotten an answer in the real world. And we find this to be true over and over again. You know, when we first started saying this to ourselves, it was sort of a joke, and then we realized, like, oh, this is really true, like, to an order of, like, five or 10 x in many cases. [00:11:09] S0: When we were just touring this facility, there was this amazing moment where you pointed to, like, a ConX, and it's got effectively the brain of the nuclear reactor in [00:11:16] S1: it. Yeah.
00:11:16 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
[00:11:16] S1: it. Yeah. [00:11:17] S0: And you said if this was bought from traditional suppliers, it would cost something like $17,000,000. Yep. And I think the idiot index for nuclear is just insanely high. How much does this cost, you know, roughly? And then what have you kind of... Like efficiencies you've been able to wring out through just doing it yourself and Yeah. Integrating?
00:11:35 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:11:35] S1: So I can't tell you the exact cost of what we spent on this plant, but I will tell you that we achieved construction complete on this site when we had raised less than a $100,000,000 in total. And obviously we spent a lot less than that on the reactor itself. So that's extraordinary for a new nuclear reactor, and by the way, this is a real nuclear reactor, this thing makes power. It hasn't turned on yet, you know, so knock on wood, we've got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks to get this thing running, but this is not a cold criticality, this is not a critical assembly, this is a reactor that makes power, it has a cooling loop, we're gonna make thermal power out of it, it's gonna have burn up, we have full shielding because we have full gamma production, we have full neutron flux, and we even have helium filtration, we have activity monitoring on our cooling loop, like, it's the full thing, and cumulatively, company history, we raised less than a $100,000,000. So that's pretty extraordinary. Now the question is like, how far does that go? By my best math today, I believe that the idiot index of nuclear is in the hundreds. So the normal, like a good idiot index for a product, right? So idiot index being what's the cost of the thing versus the cost of its constituent elements. So if you bought the elements on the commodity markets and it's just added those numbers up versus the cost that you buy, that you bought it for, that you built it for, a good idiot index is somewhere around like 10 for like an industrial product, for a mass manufactured commodity product it's, you know, it's maybe somewhere like six or seven, and nuclear's in the hundreds. That's that's kind of the best estimate I can come up with is like in the hundreds. So what does that tell you? Well, tells you that the industry is formatted incorrectly. It's formatted with a system of incentives where nobody's incentivized to actually do this well. There are too many parties that benefit from costs increasing. Right? So our strategy at Valar is we do everything. We pick up a patch of land, we clear it, we build a reactor, we many... We design the reactor, we engineer the reactor, we manufacture it, we put it on the site, we plug it in, and then we operate it. And when we own that entire scope, we are incentivized to make it as effective as possible.
00:13:56 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
We're incentivized to say, does that thing really need to cost like a million dollars when it's actually $50 of steel? Like, does that actually make sense? Does that thing need to cost $5,000,000 when it, you know, you could replicate the same function with like a couple $100,000 of of equipment? Like, those are the questions that just don't really get asked in nuclear today because there are so many different parties and different vendors and different responsibilities fractured between design and engineering and EPC and operations, and at the end of the day it's the rate payer, you know, who pays that cost. Right? So, you know, taking this as an entire market that we do well is really what's gonna fix that problem. [00:14:39] S0: It's a little bit like if Boeing made the plane, made the gasoline for the... Or the, you know, jet fuel for the plane, and then just made, you know, their optimization function was just on the ticket price.
00:14:39 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:14:39] S0: It's a little bit like if Boeing made the plane, made the gasoline for the... Or the, you know, jet fuel for the plane, and then just made, you know, their optimization function was just on the ticket price. [00:14:50] S1: That's right, and had their own airline. Yeah. Well, what's interesting about that is that that used to be the case, and we called that airline was Transworld Airways, and the Department of Justice actually broke them up and said that you cannot be both an airplane manufacturer and an airline. And I think that was a huge mistake. I think that that's one of the ways that the aviation industry went wrong is that if you have an incredible aircraft design and you're really good at manufacturing airplanes, it's hard for you to benefit from that and you don't get that final margin. Right? So if you design an aircraft that is so safe that it doesn't need pilots, you should be able to benefit from that as an aircraft manufacturer by selling tickets, but we actually can't do that. So there's a lot of structural problems in how industries are formatted that lead to things being more expensive, and I think people view nuclear as like an engineering problem, And it's a little bit deeper than that. It's it's a it's a complex coordination problem. You have to own engineering and design and manufacturing and operations and regulatory engagement and community engagement and talent and all of these different things to deliver the cheapest possible power that we can.