No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:37:11 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:37:11] S2: So you're a concrete pouring in graphite. [00:37:13] S1: We we are legitimately a nuclear company because we split atoms. Right? Mhmm. But, you know, I'm I'm serious. We didn't allow ourselves to call ourselves a nuclear startup until we'd split the first atom. Right? Because companies are what they do. Before that, we were a company that was planning to split an atom. Now we're a company that has done it, you know, 10 to the 20 or so atoms so far. That number will keep going up. But yeah. So I I think there's a a just a big gap in mindset between are you serious about scale? And I would also point out that exponential curves are very counterintuitive. Right? If you look at the predictions of how many satellites would be in orbit when when SpaceX started going, people were like, there's no way they're gonna hit the numbers that they're hitting today. And exponentials are just really, really hard for for humans to understand. So I would say, yeah, if you're looking at the nuclear space today, you don't expect people to have this problem solved in 2031. In fact, I would say even 2035, a lot of these companies are still not gonna get there because they have the wrong mindset. 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.
00:38:22 · S0, Isaiah Taylor
[00:38:22] S0: We actually had to invent our own grade of concrete in order to do this. And the reason is we need a high enough density to block gamma rays. The concrete also needs to be very strong because these are self stacking blocks. And we also can't use rebar because if we use rebar, rebar becomes activated by neutrons. So you'll actually be producing nuclear waste. We took two two engineers on our team. One of them is a nuclear physics mechanical sorry. One of the mechanical engineer, of nuclear physics, and we had them tag team this. We said go invent a grade of concrete, which has the density to block gamma rays, which has the strength to actually be a concrete block that's self cast, that has no rebar, and that has the right atomic mix that it will not become nuclear waste when it becomes irradiated. And they literally flew all around the country collecting rock samples from all around The United States. We called it the rock hunt. It was about a three week period from plane to plane literally collecting bags of rocks, they would come back on a Friday night, and they'd set up the conference room with a bunch of buckets of acid and they would dissolve the rocks and then they would take the rocks through a spectroscopy analysis to figure out the exact DPM and then they go back out the next week and collect the next sample. [00:39:38] S1: By the way,
00:39:38 · Isaiah Taylor, S0, Sarah Guo
[00:39:38] S1: By the way, [00:39:39] S0: the two team members are 23 years old and 21 years old respectively and they've done things that the nuclear industry has been dreaming of for literally thirty years. When we unveiled this system for the first time, we got DMs from people who have been in nuclear literally their entire career saying, I've been writing about how someone should do something like this since the 1980s and I've never seen anyone be able to actually pull it off. And that's a really awesome thing about working at Valor. It's also why we get the best talent in the world is because if you are a really, really talented person who cares about nuclear, you wanna see things actually get built. And so you need to go where where you can actually build things. [00:40:15] S2: You are not a paper and simulation company. You're a nuclear company. But you also seem to be a road building company and a building building company and a concrete pouring company and a rock finding company. So how do you think about, you're very opinionated that, you know, if we must for speed, we will verticalize. How do you think about like having those capabilities and why you make that decision?
00:40:37 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:40:37] S1: Yeah. I mean, this is the secret weapon of valor, and I'm gonna give you the secret weapon because I fully believe that no one will be able to copy us in this. We are willing to verticalize anything that is necessary on our path to scale, And we've proven that a couple times in this in this reactor so far in areas that we were told repeatedly was utterly impossible. And the fact is, like, when a problem is important enough, you can go solve it, and you can verticalize it. Because when a problem is as important as making energy cheap, you can go get the most talented people in the world to come and help you solve that problem. Right? You can assemble the brightest minds to tackle it. You can get the best capital formation who who helps you go and and acquire the resources necessary. And it's really a mindset thing. You know? We've talked to and and know many of the most talented nuclear engineers in the world. And what we keep finding over and over is, yes, there are amazing designs, but not much has actually been physically built. And if you have the muscle as a company to build things in the physical world, if you know how to do fundamental clean sheet design all the way through to prototyping, testing, and manufacturing, you have an edge, right, that that nobody else has in nuclear today. And so we look at really anything in the stack, And it's not that we want to verticalize everything. We'd prefer that most of the plants commoditize. Right? In theory, it'd be great if we could just buy a kit. Right? Like, if I if anyone is selling a nuclear reactor kit, I'm a buyer. Right? I'm gonna go staple together, and I'm gonna make energy, and that's great.
00:42:07 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:42:07] S2: You're just gonna make lots of plants. [00:42:08] S1: Exactly. You know, that's not how it works. In in in actuality, there are a lot of these components that are wildly overpriced that have super constrained supplies. And a fundamental edge that Valor has is that we know we are competent to verticalize any individual piece of that that prevents scale. And once we identify that, we attack it ruthlessly. [00:42:30] S2: And you don't think any piece of it is, like, you know, intersecting with more regulatory pain, too complicated for you to figure out, like, I think about your fuel supply chain,
00:42:39 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:42:39] S1: for example. Definitely intersecting with regulatory pain. Right. And, like, we run at that pain. Like, we just run toward gunfire on the most complicated things every time. We're two and a half years, three and a half know, three years into this company, and we've done something that no other nuclear startup has ever done, which is make nuclear power. And it it comes from this fundamental mindset that the teams that the team has, which is, yes, there are complexities in regulation. Yes, this is hard, you know, equipment to manufacture. Yes. It's difficult to do both of those at the same time where you have complex equipment and regulation and construction and rock hunting and pouring concrete and building buildings. But the company that figures out how to do all of that complexity at scale and at pace is going to win. And, you know, we're sitting here right now, you know, less than three years from the founding of the company, and I think if you look back at ten years, in ten years from now and, you know, Valor's worth 500,000,000,000, something like that, you will be able to see that through line where we took the hardest parts of nuclear, right, which is the site, right, and the regulatory and the fuel supply chain and the instrumentation and the shielding and all these things that everyone tries to outsource. And we said, actually, we're gonna become masters of that. Right? And we're gonna go hire the best people in the world to tackle that, and that becomes our edge and in the actual manufacturing.