No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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?
00:07:36 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:07:36] S1: There's this chicken and egg that existed for nuclear in the last twenty years where you need data in order to go to the regulator. But in order to go to the regulator with data, you have to have run a plant. Right? And so there's this, like, okay. How do you get the empirical data? And the way that people tried to solve that was with modeling and simulation. Right? So if you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valor, it's mostly a modeling and simulation industry. Like, when you think of a nuclear company, right, there's, like, nuclear companies out there that everyone knows the name of, and you kinda look under the cover, it's actually a modeling and simulation company. Right? They produce very, very precise what we call paper reactors, which have really good predictions of how a theoretical thing might behave. And that was sort of a hack to try to get around this regulatory chicken and egg. But the alternative is that you actually just do what congress originally intended. If you look back at the early days of nuclear legislation, there were actually two pathways for nuclear in The United States. There was the testing pathway and the commercial pathway. So the commercial pathway everyone knows is called the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC is solving for large scale commercial deployment of mature systems. So, yeah, if you try to do the iteration under the regulator that's concerned with large scale commercial deployment of mature systems, that's gonna be tough. Right? You're you're gonna be asked commercial deployment questions when you're just trying to figure out how to bend some steel and get some atom splitting. But there's another pathway, and that pathway is the Department of Energy. So most people don't know this, but the Department of Energy was originally called the ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Agency. And people don't know that because it was only called the ERDA for about two years. There was a little two year period where it was it was renamed shortly after, But its origin is actually a spinout of the Atomic Energy Commission. So where the DOE comes from originally is Congress taking the Atomic Energy Commission, which was one agency responsible for both commercial deployment and for testing. And they said, actually, let's split these out. Let's make the NRC in charge of commercial deployment.
00:09:43 · Isaiah Taylor
Let's make the ERDA in charge of testing, and we'll have these two two separate agencies. And then two years later, congress said, actually, we're just gonna call the ERDA the Department of Energy, right, the DOE. But the origin of this agency is testing nuclear reactors. That's what it's for. And everyone sort of forgot this. It's just been sitting there in legislation for, like, forty years, and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they wanna, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has, from a legal perspective, been waiting for an administration to say, hey. This might be a a way to accelerate nuclear r and d. And that's exactly what the Trump administration has done. So the reactor that's behind us here was turned on under an executive order. It was EO14301, which called for three advanced reactors to go critical on American soil by July 4. And and we built it under Department of Energy, authority under that executive order. So, mean, this is an incredibly exciting time in nuclear. This is really breaking that chicken and egg. Right? It's the first time where we've been able to to shortcut that, you know, problem of how do you get data, and and we have data now. We're currently, as we're sitting here, making a 100 kilowatts, splitting something like 10 to the 17 atoms per second in this reactor behind us. So this is the control room. There's two sections. This is the control half. This door is closed. We have to have senior reactor operator's permission to enter here, which we just got. Thank you, Brent. And out here is sort of our