No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:00:00 · S0, Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
[00:00:00] S0: Welcome to War two fifty, first advanced reactor to ever make power by startup. [00:00:06] S1: We did something pretty awesome today. The first ever AI chip powered by a nuclear reactor. First Triso reactor to turn on in over fifty years in The United States. [00:00:15] S2: How much of the premise of Valor is possible now comes from increasing demands for power in The United States largely driven by AI compute? [00:00:26] S1: Energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price. If you can figure out how to make energy cheaper, you will have demand. When SpaceX started going, people were like, there's no way they're gonna hit the numbers that they're hitting today. Most of the nuclear industry is a modeling and simulation industry. They're not focused on hardware iteration, hardware execution, building the simplest and safest reactor that allows them to scale. And Valor just demonstrated that we are. [00:00:55] S2: Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Isaiah Taylor, the founder and CEO of Valor Atomics. We're here in their Utah nuclear facility, where we're gonna do a tour, talk about why speed and scale are the only path to making nuclear reactors in The United States again, why energy is the only input to our hyper techno industrial future, and why there's an open regulatory environment for progress in energy R and D for the first time in years. Welcome. Isaiah, thanks so much for doing this. [00:01:25] S1: Of course. Welcome to Valor Atomics at San Rafael. Thanks for coming.
00:01:25 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
[00:01:25] S1: Of course. Welcome to Valor Atomics at San Rafael. Thanks for coming. [00:01:28] S2: So what is what are you doing here at Valor? [00:01:31] S1: We are making nuclear reactors built for planetary scale. So nuclear fission is kind of an old technology. It's around the nineteen forties that we really started working on it. And we've built a lot of nuclear reactors, but we've never built them for mass scale. Nuclear has never had its Ford moment or its Tesla moment, if you wanna put it that way. And that's what Valor Atomics is working on doing. We have nuclear reactors that are more manufactured than constructed, and, they're extremely safe. And we think the combination of these two things is going to allow us to scale nuclear fission and make energy 10 times cheaper for humanity. So that's what we're working on. [00:02:05] S2: We're gonna dig into why you think this is possible and why you're making it happen after decades of like no real activity in this space. But first, for you personally, you don't have the, you know, credentialed decades of nuclear research background that is often required to work in this space. Like, you know, why you and what triggered it?
00:02:26 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:02:26] S1: I have been reluctant to start this company for a long time and eventually did out of sheer frustration that, nobody else was was working on it with the pace required and understanding the scale that would be required. And, you know, I think any problem that, you want to work on that's that's as hard as this, you have to really, really believe in it. And after a certain amount of time, I just realized that I was never gonna stop thinking about this, and so I I might as well build it. It started for me. My great grandfather was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. My great grandfather and great grandmother were both in the secret city during World War two, and I just grew up thinking about nuclear as this incredible technology. I've I've always wanted to build thousands of machines. I didn't know which ones I was gonna build. It was just very clear to me since I was, six that I was supposed to build thousands of machines. And at some point, I I went from thinking about nuclear as, like, a totally solved problem, right, which was my first, you know, outside view of the industry. Was like, okay. People know how to build reactors. They're doing fine at it. To suddenly realizing that this was an entirely unsolved problem that we we sort of thought we solved in the sixties, and there was, like, a good run into the seventies, and then we suddenly stopped. So I came to that realization. It was very disorienting for me, actually. I I suddenly realized it. I actually remember the afternoon when I like, wait a minute. Did we actually stop building reactors in the seventies? Like, who why did nobody tell me that? And really since that moment, I had been, like, obsessively trying to understand why. And I I came to some conclusions about why when I was in high school, and I I still hold those conclusions today. And then it was a, you know, ten year journey of, like, waiting for someone to solve the problem, watching every nuclear startup that popped up trying to figure out if they were gonna solve the problem, and eventually realizing that that no one was gonna solve it at the pace and scale that was necessary. And so I started Valor.
00:04:23 · Sarah Guo
[00:04:23] S2: So for people who come from outside the nuclear industry, like, why did we stop building reactors in this country?
00:04:29 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:04:29] S1: Yeah. We stopped for a pretty simple reason, which is 3 Mile Island. So we were building a lot of reactors. We were doing really well. We had a a nuclear incident in the 3 Mile 3 Mile Island reactor, and in that incident, we essentially lost the ability to cool the reactor. And in traditional light water reactors, you have to always be able to cool them. Right? So if you shut a reactor down in in traditional nuclear, you have to keep cooling it even after shutdown. And in this case, the cooling system failed, and so you had core meltdown. Now nobody died. Right? In fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured, and there was no radiation dose to the public, but it was sort of a optics and PR situation that was mismanaged in many, many different ways, and the public became fearful and and lost interest in nuclear. Now I think that actually turned around even, like, fifteen, twenty years ago where suddenly people looked back on that, and they said, okay, actually, we do know how to build reactors really safe. Even learnings from that we've taken and incorporated into new designs. But then there was a second problem, which was once you stop an industry, it's very hard to start it again. And in the intervening time between 3 Mile Island and when people gained interest in nuclear again, we also really changed how we built things in The United States. We went from a country that was very good at large scale civil infrastructure. Right? Bridges, roads, huge power plants, dams, highway systems. Right? We were really good at large scale civil infrastructure. And we kind of atrophied at that skill set, and we got much better at advanced manufacturing. And so my realization, one of the first realizations I had about this was if you're going to reboot nuclear and you're actually believe in in the atomic energy century, which I absolutely do, it's probably not going to look like what it did in the sixties. It's not gonna look like civil infrastructure because we're not that good at that anymore, and what we're way better at is producing, you know, more complicated and more functional pieces of manufactured equipment. And so you're gonna shift from the civil infrastructure way of building to a manufacturing way of building.
00:06:34 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
And I think even though some people did realize that, and this is generally what you'd call SMRs, right, small modular reactors, what was missing is that people did not realize that you're gonna have to pursue that model through hardware iteration. And that's where really where Valor is unique is that, yes, we believe in SMRs. We believe in reactors that are manufactured, but we also know that in order to get there, you have to do it through harder iteration. You have to turn some plants on. You have to turn on a 100 kilowatt reactor like the one behind us. You have to go cold critical like we did in project Nova, and then you have to take the next steps after that. And it's gonna be driven by hardware iteration, and I think that's what nobody else realized before us. [00:07:17] S2: So that's a whole company philosophy for you, but it has to interact with a regulatory environment where I think the assumed status quo is you can't iterate because you can't turn anything on, but it's gonna take you fifteen years to go to a permitting process and several billion dollars to get a no or try again. [00:07:34] S1: Yes. [00:07:34] S2: And so like why why isn't that true now?