No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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?
00:24:41 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:24:41] S1: Yeah. We just turned on number one. So we went critical back in November. That was our first criticality. That was what you'd call a a cold criticality or critical pile. And just a few days ago, we made power for the first time in our first reactor. So that's the the Ward 250 reactor. Obviously, the next goal is go turn on another one, but there's a sort of a success metric here that we talk about in the company, and and we call it tick rate. So tick rate is is how we judge ourselves and how we judge other people in the nuclear field. Tick rate is you know, comes from video games. Right? And it's sort of the the time in between changes in the game state. Right? And for us, what this means is how long from the founding of our company to the first time we split an Adam to the second time to the third time to the fourth time. And the goal of the company is to get that tick rate as low as possible. Right? So our first ever mark from filing in Delaware to first atom split was two years and four months. From Project Nova, first atom split to the second time here in this reactor was about seven months. And the goal is to get that window as short as possible, and we will get it down to minutes. This company will get will will get to the point where we have a new reactor turning on every few minutes. And when we do that, if you look at the the economics of nuclear, it really is driven by how quickly and cheaply can you produce plants. Right? The uranium is very cheap. Right? The the fuel is very cheap. The question is, can you produce plants quickly and cheaply? And that is going to be driven by iteration and by scale, which ultimately is driven by tick rate. So I'm very proud of the team. We've done some enormous, incredible things that no other nuclear startup has been able to do yet, but we are nowhere near done. We're very hungry, and we're gonna make that tick rate, you know, six months and then four and then one and then into the minutes.
00:26:31 · S0
[00:26:31] S0: Welcome to OR two fifty. Wow. So where you are standing right now is the first advanced reactor to ever make power by a startup. The first advanced reactor ever built outside of a national laboratory. This is the fifth new nuclear device to make power in The United States since the year 2000. Valor is the only private company founded since the discovery of nuclear fission that has ever made nuclear power. And this is really the thing that that is unique about what we're doing is that we're a new team. We're a new company, and we're attacking nuclear fission from first principles. You all the other companies in the space who've actually made power before were, you know, are a 100 year old or a 150 year old utilities, defense contractors, large engineering corporations, and they haven't really done fundamental r and d. What they've done is they've picked up sort of government work, commercialized it a little bit, done some supply chain integration, but this is like startup mindset applied to nuclear fission and there's a lot of things about this plant that's different that you'll be able to see. The first one is what we're looking at right here. This big awesome structure is called the Modular Citadel. I'm gonna talk to you for a few minutes about concrete and it's gonna sound like I'm a big concrete nerd and I guess that's okay. But this is actually some of the more innovative stuff that we've done in this reactor. The purpose of this concrete is a BioShield. The reason we're able to stand here and not be receiving unhealthy doses of radiation right now is because there's 78 inches of concrete in front of this reactor. If this concrete were not here we would not be able to stand here but it's actually very special concrete. The modular citadel is a series of precast blocks So each of these blocks was actually created in a factory. It's our factory. We have a what we call the Citadel factory in Salt Lake City and we have a production line where we could create 3,000 blocks a year that are identical to these. And they arrive here on a truck, and then they get placed by this crane up here. So that's why we have this crane. They can place these blocks. And what's really awesome about this is people have thought about doing this before in nuclear. They thought about free cast blocks.
00:28:43 · S0
But the problem is, well, if you're gonna put two concrete blocks together, if you were to zoom in on a microscopic level, those blocks are actually not touching. Right? Nothing's actually touching on a microscopic level. You have a little gap between there, and gamma rays can slip between the gaps, and neutrons can slip between the gaps. So what you can't see here and I'll show you some photos afterward is that if you were to look with an x-ray in that seam right there you would actually see that the concrete itself follows what we call a tortuous path. So it's a sine wave. So the concrete on every seam follows a sine wave curve and actually on the vertical edges as well. So if you were looking at vertical seam you would also see a sine wave. If you were to look in the corners you would see a sine wave. There is no straight path from the inside of the reactor to the outside through the modular citadel for a ray to follow straight through concrete. And what's even more interesting is that traditionally when people have thought of this, because it's really hard to get that casting shape right and to get it to actually be solid enough to bear all of this weight, the way that they get around this is they would grout it. So they would grout it with more concrete. You'd have like sort of a wet concrete mix that you use to seal them together. This has no grout. These blocks are literally just stacked. In fact there's no mechanical lock between them either. There are no bolts. There are no screws. We do have this frame around it. This is called a seismic frame. We did this we actually don't need it according to our engineering calculations. The Utah State Building Code, there's a disagreement about whether or not we need a seismic frame. They're like, oh, let's just put it on just to be safe. But the entire Citadel has no fastening of any kind in the blocks. And what that means is we went from three months, which is what it would normally take to build a BioShield like this, to we stack this in about forty two hours.
00:30:40 · Sarah Guo
[00:30:40] S2: How do you explain the pace of what you're capable of doing here versus other people that are trying and have been trying?