No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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.
00:43:57 · S0, Isaiah Taylor
[00:43:57] S0: This is another really good example of makes what makes Valor unique. This is our control skin. These three boxes right there are basically a analog to digital electronics box. So [00:44:12] S1: if you [00:44:13] S0: know anything about electronic circuitry, it's pretty simple stuff. You've got some signal amplifiers. You have some basic rectifiers in there. And and basically we take some analog signals from [00:44:24] S1: our our detectors and we
00:44:24 · Isaiah Taylor, S0
[00:44:24] S1: our our detectors and we [00:44:26] S0: send them to the control room. Each one of those boxes cost $450,000. This is when it when anyone talks to you about like cost and nuclear like oh nuclear is expensive. They are talking about ridiculous things like this. Right? And this is really where Valor's gonna win. That we accepted the $450,000 cost on this one because we're moving really fast, you know, and spending a million and a half dollars for these three boxes was more worthwhile to us than taking a couple months of delay. But this box over here, totally different story. This one, it was fit out at $5,000,000. They told us that it was gonna cost $5,000,000 to buy that box right there. That is our, what's called reactor protection system, RPS. This is basically the brain of the reactor. This system right here is super unique. It has no human input. It's basically a self deterministic machine that decides whether or not the plant is in a safe state. So it has three different sections of boat against itself to say is the plant in a safe state or not. And if two of them boat that the plant is not in a safe state, it shuts down. And we were quoted about $5,000,000, and we were told it would take it would take about two and a [00:45:39] S1: half years to build.