No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:18:48 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
Our safety basis when we go to the regulator is everything in the plant has failed. Absolutely everything. Right? Everything We [00:18:55] S2: know what happens. [00:18:56] S1: Yeah. In fact, it is it is safe. Right? So we have regulatory limits where we say, okay, in an accident scenario, you can't dose the public with radiation. Right? That's really ultimately what a nuclear regulator is trying to prevent. You can't dose public and workers with radiation. And so our safety basis says, alright, let's look at the reactor design and pretend that everything in it has failed. Are we dosing the workers in the public with radiation? And the answer is no. And that's super, super important because even though we do still try to reduce the odds, we have site security, we make sure that our operators are well trained. We start with the worst case possible scenario where everything has failed, and we say, how do we make that that safe? And that's really a physics problem. It's really about the geometry of the core. It's about the materials that you use. Triso is a huge part of that, and and that's how we pursue safety. So I think that that people miss that, a, nuclear is already very safe, but, b, the new breed of root of nuclear is much more focused on just making sure that these plants are intrinsically and inherently safe regardless of odds, right, regardless of what crazy thing comes out of left field, and that's a much better way to scale. [00:20:06] S2: What are the major causes of, like, reliability issues for a reactor?
00:20:06 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:20:06] S2: What are the major causes of, like, reliability issues for a reactor? [00:20:11] S1: Of this design, let's see. Helium circulator is one area that people have had trouble with in the past. The heat exchanger between the main helium loop and the secondary power conversion loop is something that fourteen Brands has had issues with. I don't know, Jess, what do you think?
00:20:29 · Jess
[00:20:29] S4: Moisture as well. Fourteen Brands had problems with moisture. So graphite is hydrophilic, meaning that it loves to take moisture. Even in the hot desert air, hot dry desert air, it still sucks up moisture. So, we have mitigated that risk by having the helium purification system. And part of that is taking the moisture and trying to condense that moist air out of the system and then put it into some supply tanks or some to some storage tanks outside of that. We know it's it's a it's a known fact that for several hundred hours of operation, we'll be slowly leaching that moisture out of the graphite blocks as we keep keep them and maintain the temperature. So as you know, it's graphite ceramic, probably saw the block on the way in. So it's kinda difficult to migrate that moisture from the center of the block all the way out. That's why it takes so long. It's just keeping up to temperature and slowly migrates its way out in the blocks. But if you don't capture that moisture and remove it from the system, then you can imagine any carbon steel, which is in the system, will be in the rust. Then those rust particles will migrate and either cause a shortage in the motor or a blockage in the system somewhere. So anyway, that's one of the lessons learned from forcing brownness. You need to
00:21:31 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
[00:21:31] S1: on the moisture. I will say that helium graphite systems have a lot of natural advantages. And you know there's basically no chemistry going on other than the bit of moisture that we need to pull out of the graphite blocks. Helium is inert, right? And unlike a water based reactor where you have you're very, very carefully trying to make sure you have dry steam if it's dry steam plant and wet steam is going to start just destroying all of your thermal machinery and everything, helium is, a very, very inert simple chemical to work as a working fluid. Now there are downsides to it. It's not very dense. You have to have more pumping power, these sorts of things. But the fundamentals are in our favor in terms of building a very simple plant. [00:22:13] S2: When we think about, you know, an abundance of nuclear power [00:22:16] S1: Yeah. [00:22:17] S2: I think a lot of interested listeners will have heard of a number of SMR startups and people building larger scale reactors. How do you how do you break out, like, the different use cases and the different designs here? Are are people aiming at different power levels and efficiencies? Is it just a completely different philosophy of company? How do you how do you look at that landscape?
00:22:40 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:22:40] S1: Yeah. I would make one big division in nuclear companies, and it is people who believe that nuclear is essentially a hardware execution problem and people who believe that it's a design problem. Valor is solidly in the camp that we believe this is a hardware execution problem. This is really an issue of can you build reactors? Can you turn them on? Can you get them running? Can you operate them well? Can you produce them at scale? Can you go from making one to 10 to a 100 to a thousand? That is the the problem of nuclear. The second class of nuclear companies, I think, are mistaken, think that this is a a problem of, like, making the most beautiful design, making the most sophisticated design. The design will have, you know, the most perfect efficiency. You know, you look inside some of these these design documents, and there's so much complexity. And, you know, the materials that go into it are super rare, and you have to set up entire supply chains that don't exist just to get the thing running. And I look at that and I say, okay. Maybe over time the reactor grows in complexity and you start to use some more rare materials to try to get higher and higher performance. But the problem of nuclear today is like the Toyota Camry problem. Right? Like, we don't wanna make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. And, actually, that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world. Right? You maybe will get a little bit better performance out of a more complicated reactor, but I'm gonna beat you on cost because I'm making a thousand of them. Right? And that's really what we care about. Valor is in the business of making energy 10 times cheaper for for humanity, and we want to continue doing that forever. There will always be ways to make energy cheaper and cheaper, and that's very much our goal. And I think the big difference in in philosophy is do you tackle that through building reactors and through iteration, or do you tackle that through design? And and we believe it's entirely a hardware problem.
00:24:31 · Sarah Guo
[00:24:31] S2: Where and the so the company is less than three years old, just about to turn three. Yep. Where in the timeline of, you know, hundreds of reactors are we?