Manufacturing 1,000s of Nuclear Reactors | Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics

Summary

Ti Morse sits down with Isaiah Taylor, founder of Valar Atomics, at the company’s first reactor test site in Utah — a patch of bare dirt in September that, nine months later, holds what Taylor hopes will be the first advanced reactor to make power in American history, expected to go critical around July 4th. Taylor lays out a “manufacturing-first” philosophy borrowed directly from SpaceX and the Falcon 9: rather than iterate on paper for years, Valar builds real hardware fast to uncover the “fundamentally unknowable” problems that only reveal themselves on a real site. The reactor’s ~25 megawatt size wasn’t chosen up front — it was discovered by asking how to build something that’s easy to replicate with existing supply chains and tooling, then working backwards to a power level.

A central thread is the nuclear industry’s astronomical “idiot index” — the ratio between a finished product’s cost and the cost of its raw materials — which Taylor estimates sits in the hundreds, versus roughly ten for a normal industrial product. His fix is total vertical integration: Valar clears the land, designs, engineers, manufactures, sites, plugs in, and operates the reactor, aligning every incentive toward the goal of making energy ten times cheaper. He recounts making control rod drive units in-house after suppliers quoted 18-to-36-month lead times, and fabricating a custom loader truck in 48 hours to get the reactor onto a C-17. The second half is a detailed tour of “physics safety” versus “engineering safety”: Valar’s high-temperature gas reactor uses graphite moderation and TRISO fuel with strongly negative thermal feedback, so the core physically cannot melt down even with all cooling shut off — something Valar tested for real in Los Angeles.

Throughout, Taylor returns to culture and pace: obsessing over the “critical path” (in bold red letters on an office screen), sprinting through one-way doors, going into “wartime mode” with all-hands war rooms, and treating “clock time” as the most valuable and irreducible asset in deep tech. He argues slow and safe are not the same thing — that faster iteration actually makes an industry safer — and frames July 4th not merely as a symbolic 250th-anniversary deadline but as a rebirth of America getting back into the business of building real reactors and splitting atoms, on the road to a million of them.

Highlights

”Steel is cheaper than software engineers”

“At Valor we have a phrase which is that steel is cheaper than software engineers… you could buy a lot of steel for the same amount of money that you got a software answer. And for that amount you probably could have welded it together and gotten an answer in the real world.” — Isaiah Taylor, 10:09

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”The idiot index of nuclear is in the hundreds”

“A good idiot index is somewhere around like 10 for like an industrial product. For a mass-manufactured commodity product… it’s maybe something like six or seven. And nuclear’s in the hundreds.” — Isaiah Taylor, 12:30

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”We just built a truck with 48 hours’ notice”

“Our steel team got together and said, ‘What if we just built a truck with 48 hours’ notice?’… And literally 24 hours later we had fabricated a truck that we then used to load our nuclear reactor on a C-17. Probably one of the most ridiculous works of rapid engineering and fabrication in history.” — Isaiah Taylor, 43:54

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”It’s not engineering safety, it’s physics safety”

“When we talk about nuclear safety in the terms of the plants that Valor Atomics builds, it’s not engineering safety, it’s physics safety… It comes from the basic choices that we’ve made in the physics and materials and geometry of our plants, not whether or not a single pump works or a single valve works.” — Isaiah Taylor, 72:41

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”A high tolerance for looking dumb”

“I have a very high tolerance for looking dumb. That’s one of my secret weapons… my ability to uncover what is actually true is directly correlated with my ability to make the right decisions and move fast.” — Isaiah Taylor, 78:14

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”Clock time stops for no man”

“Clock time keeps ticking no matter if you’re Elon Musk or you’re a dude on the street… So clock time is the most valuable and most difficult asset.” — Isaiah Taylor, 81:17

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Key Points

• A SpaceX problem, not a Tesla problem (0:53) - Valar is building a complicated reactor that’s easy to replicate and deploy repeatably, like the Falcon 9, not a mass-production consumer product
• The size was discovered, not designed (0:53) - Valar didn’t set a power level for 12-18 months; they let manufacturing methods and existing supply chains yield the size, landing around 25 MW (40 reactors = a gigawatt)
• Iterating on paper doesn’t work (4:42) - The only path from one to ten reactors is turning one on, then another, uncovering “fundamentally unknowable” problems no analysis could predict
• The EPC era can’t be repeated (6:00) - Old-style plant design worked only because the AEC ran 70 test reactors and a healthy combustion-plant EPC industry existed; neither is true today
• Modular shielding that just stacks (7:54) - The team abandoned then returned to ultra-modular shielding; blocks are crane-placed with no grout, bolts, or connections, after “16,000 extremely hard things”
• Steel is cheaper than software engineers (10:09) - Buying steel and welding an answer in the real world often beats months of analysis by 5-10x
• Construction complete under $100M (11:37) - Valar reached construction complete having raised less than $100 million total, extraordinary for a real, power-making nuclear reactor
• The idiot index of nuclear is in the hundreds (12:30) - Versus ~10 for an industrial product; the industry is “formatted incorrectly” with too many parties benefiting from rising costs
• The TWA analogy (14:54) - The DOJ breaking up an aircraft maker that also ran an airline was a mistake; nuclear needs a single actor owning the entire stack
• Not a nuclear company until you split an atom (16:25) - Taylor refused to let employees call Valar a nuclear company before splitting the first atom, or a “factory” before it makes two reactors of the same type
• Don’t lie to yourself (19:24) - The industry’s core self-deception is assuming “we know how to do this”; humility to admit America no longer knows how to build advanced reactors is the starting point
• Obsessing over critical path (22:29) - The most over-repeated phrase at Valar; they built custom software for it and the answer changes every week
• Reactors are simpler than a V8 engine (25:29) - A pressure tank, a moderator, and uranium; reactors make as much heat as you pull out of them via thermal feedback of reactivity
• Slow and safe are not the same (28:22) - Faster iteration lets you discover and deploy safer designs; this plant is argued to be orders of magnitude safer than existing light-water plants
• Making the pump yourself (31:21) - Suppliers quoted 18-36 months for control rod drive units, so Valar built them in-house through ~40 iterations in a helium pressure chamber
• Community engagement as core scope (33:00) - Valar spends heavily getting to know city councils and neighbors before setting up shop, openly telling communities the startup could fail
• Toyota Camry, not Ferrari (35:20) - Trade off efficiency, power density, and size for simplicity and safety; factories are “buildings where things go to become free”
• Sprinting through one-way doors (38:26) - Unlike the Bezos framework, Valar runs fast through one-way doors too, willing to risk large capital — $40M zero-or-one swings
• Wartime mode (46:46) - Gather precise information to ground-level truth; a licensing gap triggered a weekend-long all-hands war room in a construction trailer
• Elon as an injector of urgency (51:52) - Pace is the one thing you can’t improve about a company culture, only make worse; it’s easier to start fresh than to speed up a slow company
• North Star never changed (57:19) - When the executive orders came, Valar pivoted from the Philippines to Utah in a day because the goal — energy 10x cheaper — stayed fixed
• Physics safety, not engineering safety (61:03) - Strongly negative thermal feedback of reactivity plus graphite and TRISO fuel make the reactor incapable of meltdown even with all cooling off
• They tested the meltdown scenario for real (71:54) - In LA, Valar ran the reactor hot for a week, shut off all safety systems, and watched the temperature plateau then fall over two days
• Bleed scale (74:43) - Every choice is engineered for maximum scale; extreme safety is a scaling enabler because it simplifies operations, manufacturing, and supply chains
• Clock time is irreducible (81:17) - Some things (like heat-treat soak time) just take time; money can’t buy them, which forces parallelism and starting important clocks early
• Scaling is a thing you do, not design toward (88:26) - You’re either building reactor after reactor and shrinking the tick rate, or you haven’t started scaling at all
• July 4th as a rebirth (89:49) - The deadline for the pilot program under EO 14301; a real 100 kW reactor matters “infinitely more” than the best paper design

Mentions

Companies

• Valar Atomics (0:00) - Isaiah Taylor’s nuclear reactor company building the Utah test site
• SpaceX (0:53) - The Falcon 9 replicable-vehicle model Valar draws its manufacturing philosophy from; also referenced for inverting the global launch cadence
• Tesla (0:53) - Cited as the “mass manufacturing” contrast to the SpaceX-style problem Valar faces
• Toyota (35:02) - The Camry as the mass-produced simplicity target versus a Ferrari
• Trans World Airways (TWA) (14:54) - The aircraft-maker-plus-airline that the DOJ broke up, Taylor’s cautionary tale for vertical integration
• Boeing (14:41) - Ti’s analogy for a manufacturer owning fuel and ticket-price optimization
• NVIDIA (description) - Valar became the first startup to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor
• Rocket Lab (73:06) - Named alongside China as the other players on the launch-cadence chart
• Rainmaker (58:32) - The lab where Ti first met Isaiah, sleeping on the floor

Products & Technologies

• TRISO fuel (70:21) - Fuel that can reach over 2,000 degrees without compromising, central to the passive-safety design
• Graphite moderator core (18:00) - Pure-graphite core with high thermal inertia; sublimates around 3,000 degrees Celsius rather than melting
• High-temperature gas reactor (HTGR) (76:34) - The low-power-density, helium-cooled format Valar believes will actually scale
• Control rod drive units (31:21) - Built in-house after ~40 iterations when suppliers quoted 18-36 months
• C-17 (41:04) - The military transport Valar containerized and flew the reactor on to prove transportability
• Falcon 9 (0:53) - The replicable-vehicle benchmark
• Raptor thrust chamber (25:10) - Cited (~300 bar) as an example of “properly hard” engineering versus simpler reactors
• Claude / ChatGPT / OpenAI (39:00) - AI tools that now let you read laws and regs faster to boil decisions to fundamentals
• EO 14301 (90:00) - The executive order creating the July 4th nuclear pilot program

People

• Isaiah Taylor (0:00) - Founder of Valar Atomics
• Ti Morse (0:00) - Host of Relentless
• Elon Musk (28:02) - Held up as the greatest injector of urgency and giver of a “category” for fundamental industry change
• Jeff Bezos (38:07) - The one-way-door / two-way-door decision framework
• Palmer Luckey (79:55) - Credited for handling hit pieces and vocally defending Valar in its early days
• Josh Steinman (47:33) - Friend appointed to the Department of War’s board of technologists; source of “nothing takes more than 15 minutes, it’s just whose 15 minutes”
• Donald Trump (21:58) - Whose election and nuclear executive orders created Valar’s July 4th deadline

Surprising Quotes

“This was a bare patch of dirt in September… and now we’re sitting here in front of what we hope will be the first advanced reactor to make power in American history.” — Isaiah Taylor, 0:15

“Factories are places where cheap things come out… factories are buildings where things go to become free. And so nuclear reactors need to go to factories to become free.” — Isaiah Taylor, 36:00

“I know people with billions of dollars in this industry who aren’t doing anything, so money is actually not really the primary thing in this game.” — Isaiah Taylor, 84:00

“If you poke Valor in any place, you prick us in any place, we’ll bleed scale.” — Isaiah Taylor, 74:43

“We value a small reactor making 100 kilowatts of power infinitely more than the best possible design. Infinitely more.” — Isaiah Taylor, 90:32

Transcript

Ti Morse: 0:00 Today I’m sitting down with Isaiah Taylor, the founder of Valor Atomics at their first reactor test site in Utah. 12 months ago there was nothing here, now there’s a massive reactor in our background and in about three or four weeks this thing is going to go critical, I believe for the first time.

Isaiah Taylor: 0:15 That’s the goal. Yeah. And actually in September, there was nothing here. This was a bare patch of dirt in September, we released a video of us doing a groundbreaking and doing some bedrock blasting and now we’re sitting here in front of what we hope will be the first advanced reactor to make power in American history. So, it’s- it’s been a wild nine months.

Ti Morse: 0:33 This is a fascinating problem because up until now it’s just basically in this R&D phase of getting through regulatory hurdles and making sure that the thing actually works. And then as soon as you turn it on it turns into a manufacturing problem and you have to then scale to like, you know, we were at your next facility today where you’re going to try to build like 100 a year. So what does the scale up look like? What does that ramp look like?

Isaiah Taylor: 0:53 Yeah, you know, I would relate this a lot to the Falcon 9 actually. What we’re trying to do here is we’re trying to build a reactor which is easy to replicate. It’s a little bit different from mass manufacturing, right? Different from like a Tesla style problem, more like a SpaceX style problem. So you have a complicated vehicle that you need to get really good at building in a repeatable fashion and deploying in a repeatable fashion, but it’s not like mass production, right? So that’s a really unique area and I actually think it’s an area that we can be uniquely good at in the United States. We have some really talented people who work on objects of about this size in very similar manufacturing methods and we’ve actually designed the reactor around that. So when I first started the company we actually didn’t have a size in mind for the first reactor. And- and it was very explicit we told the team we don’t know how big the reactor is, we don’t know how powerful it is. We didn’t know those numbers until probably a year to 18 months into the company. We told ourselves we are going to discover the power level through the manufacturing process. So we’re going to go out to how do you build a reactor that’s easy to build? How do we use supply chains that already exist? How do we use tooling that already exists? And that will yield a certain size and a certain shape and then you work backwards through normal core power density to a power output. And you know our instinct was as long as that number turns out to be somewhere above 15 megawatts, we should be pretty good for mass production. If you’re under 15 megawatts it’s pretty hard to scale the right way, you just end up doing so many different pieces of operations that it becomes more complicated. But our feeling is above the 15 megawatt breakpoint you have something that can really scale and we think this ends up somewhere around 25 megawatts. So 25 megawatts being that- that sort of scale factor if you want a gigawatt you do 40 of them. So, you know, the next challenge for us to figure out as we turn this on and turn the next one on and turn the next one on is how do we get to the place where we are turning on a reactor every day? And then multiple reactors every day. And that’s how we’re going to climb into the gigawatts. It’s not going to be these really large scale plants.

Ti Morse: 2:58 What is the like pro- What does that process look like going from just the first reactor to the first like ten?

Isaiah Taylor: 3:04 A whole lot of pain and suffering. (chuckles)

Ti Morse: 3:07 Yeah. (chuckles)

Isaiah Taylor: 3:08 It’s hard, like it’s really, really hard because what you would want to do and I think what people in the nuclear industry have tried to do is iterate in the design and you keep trying to design better and design better and design better, you maybe even have supply chain conversations, you go out and talk to suppliers and, you know, a few years down the road you think you have something that’s really manufacturable. But we know from experience that the first time you go to build something it doesn’t work like you designed it, right? And your analysis was wrong in this way and that way and guess what? The supplier that you thought was awesome turns out they didn’t deliver on time or at all, um, or, you know, they can only deliver half of what they thought they could and- and so you end up having to vertically integrate. So it’s very counter-intuitive but the only way to go from one to ten, uh, is to turn one on and then turn another one on and then try to turn on two and then try to turn on three and through this process you will uncover all of these things that were fundamentally unknowable. You just could not have predicted at the tenth what it would have taken to get to- to the tenth. And so, you know, I think this is what sets Valar apart, um, this is where we’re really, really unique. We really, we know that we need to get to hundreds of reactors, but we know that the path to hundreds is through turning one on and getting good at that and then turning another one on and- and going through that, you know, that really detailed process of learning.

Ti Morse: 4:34 I don’t know how people kind of came to the conclusion that iterating on paper made sense. This has not worked anywhere else and so what do you think- like how did that happen?

Isaiah Taylor: 4:42 Yeah, you know, I think that in nuclear, it’s particularly tempting because nuclear operations are really, really hard. Like it’s just really hard to split an atom. Not from a, uh, technical standpoint, it’s actually pretty easy to split an atom from a technical standpoint, but from the perspective of operationally being a company that can build a core, uh, can fuel it, and then take it critical, that is actually a really, really hard thing to do. Um, you know, in terms of making sure that your analysis systems are actually good, right? Does your analysis lead to something that, you know, becomes real in the physical world? Do you have security? Do you have MC&A? Um, you know, do you have really good operations team that understands what they’re doing? Does the regulator agree with you on all of those things, right? So because iteration is so difficult in nuclear, people have just sort of defaulted to design, right? Because you can do design on paper, right? And, uh, and so that’s really what we’ve been- what we’ve been doing. The other thing is I think that people, um, look back to an era of nuclear where it was more possible to do some- some things in design land. Uh, what I mean is there’s a certain period in- in nuclear history where you had sort of like the EPC-driven, uh, style of building nuclear plants and it- it kind of worked. And the reason it kind of worked-

Isaiah Taylor: 6:00 Just because we had already done a lot of fundamental R&D in real world tests, right? So the Atomic Energy Commission turned on 70 different nuclear reactor prototypes. The Navy ran all these different nuclear reactor prototypes. And then we also had a very healthy EPC industry in terms of combustion plants, right? So gas and coal plants. And so you kind of took those two things together and you could sort of throw that into an engineering context and do some plant engineering and throw it to an EPC and you get a plant out of it.

Isaiah Taylor: 6:30 None of those things are true today. Like, we haven’t been turning on 70 test reactors. We don’t have that, you know, huge core of people who have just turned on 70 test reactors. And we’re also not very good at even building normal plants anymore. Like, we don’t build plants at the speed that we should, at the scale that we should. We don’t build bridges as fast as we used to. We don’t build, you know, dams and highways and all these other works of civil infrastructure. And so assuming that we could sort of go back to building nuclear the way that we were in the ’60s and ’70s just is not true. And so really how we have to build nuclear now is the way that you’d build any other deep technology category, which is it has to be iterative. You have to get a group of smart people together in a room. You have to start in hardware. You have to build as quickly and safely as you can and get real world data. And it really is the only way and you will quickly learn from that and you’ll learn lessons that no matter how smart the other guys are, they will just never learn those lessons, right? Like, without the hardware, they just will not discover, you know, the painful lessons that we’ve learned in this plant.

Ti Morse: 7:41 What are a few of the things that you had on paper you thought things were going to work and then you’re like have contact with reality and everything gets fucked?

Isaiah Taylor: 7:54 Yeah, I mean, you know, there’s like so many of these examples and, you know, I’m probably some of the things I’m about to say will go try the other way and they’ll discover that it’s even more painful to do the other way. So I’m even hesitant to even say some of these things, but like a good example here is even the story behind this Citadel here. We had originally thought, okay, we’re going to have to go to modular construction on our nuclear shielding eventually because you really don’t want to be casting on site. Like when we get to scaled production of nuclear reactors and we want to turn on a reactor every day, we can’t be pouring concrete and doing like rebar work and formwork before we go and turn a reactor on. So we have to get to modular shielding. And, you know, three months into the process of figuring out how do we actually make modular shielding, we’re like banging our heads against the wall and we’re like, ‘This is impossible. Like, we’ve given ourselves an impossible challenge.’ And so I directed the team, like, ‘Screw this. We’re not doing modular shielding this time. Like, let’s figure out let’s just pour it in place, right? Like, we’ll tackle that later.’ And we spent a couple weeks, like, figuring out how to pour in place and we realized, ‘Oh, that will add two months to schedule.’ Like, we’ll actually just add two months where we can’t do anything because we’re doing rebar and we’re doing formwork and then we’re—

Isaiah Taylor: 9:00 boring in the reactor supposed to be inside and we’re supposed to be doing wiring. And so then we actually came back to ultra-modular shielding again and ran into the 16,000 extremely hard things that it took to get this right where we don’t have to grout this shielding. Like that’s an extraordinary thing. The fact that we can actually stack this shielding up with the crane, we’ve got an overhead crane here, and we just place those blocks, they don’t connect together, we don’t have, you know, like bolts that bolt into each other, we don’t have grout.

Ti Morse: 9:30 It’s just stacked.

Isaiah Taylor: 9:31 It’s just stacked and that was extremely difficult to get right. Um, and you know, our engineers have like 15 different things, you know, we all have 15 different things in our heads that we had to run into and do a brick wall and then work a way around it. Um, and you know, I just think about if you were to try to design this on paper and we did, right? We did design this on paper a year ago and it looks very different from how we originally designed it. And like could you in theory have gone through like 10 more design cycles to try to get here? Maybe. Um, but it would have taken like years to go through those design cycles.

Ti Morse: 10:05 A little bit more efficient to just like shoot the rocket up and see what happens.

Isaiah Taylor: 10:09 Yeah, exactly. And so at Valor we have a phrase which is that steel is cheaper than software engineers. So like software engineers are like actually very expensive. You think, okay, we want to understand the nature of this problem and we want to do a really good design and we’re going to do that through analysis, right? If you’re doing that through analysis, you’re paying software engineers and the software engineers are going to go and, you know, come up with this perfect imperfect world model and then they’re going to test against this world model and you’re going to be a couple months later with an answer. And if you add up the, you know, salary cost of the people on that team over that amount of time and then you go and say how much steel could I have bought for that amount of money? It turns out you could buy a lot of steel for the same amount of money that you got a software answer. And for that amount you probably could have welded it together and gotten an answer in the real world. Um, and we find this to be true over and over again. You know, when we first started saying this to ourselves, it was sort of a joke and then we realized like, oh, this is really true, like to an order of like 5 or 10x in many cases.

Ti Morse: 11:11 When we were just touring this facility, there’s this amazing moment where you pointed to like a Connex and it’s got effectively the brain of the nuclear reactor in it. Yeah. And you said if this was bought from traditional suppliers, it would cost something like $17 million. And I think the idiot index for nuclear is just insanely high. How much does this cost, you know, roughly, and then what have you kind of like efficiencies you’ve been able to wring out through just doing it yourself and vertically integrating?

Isaiah Taylor: 11:37 So I can’t tell you the exact cost of what we spent on this plant, but I will tell you that we did achieve construction complete on this site when we had raised less than $100 million in total. And obviously we spent a lot less than that on the reactor itself. So that’s extraordinary for a new nuclear reactor. And by the way, this is a real nuclear reactor. This thing…

Isaiah Taylor: 12:00 Makes power. It hasn’t turned on yet, you know, so knock on wood, we’ve got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks to get this thing running. But this is not a cold criticality, this is not a critical assembly. This is a reactor that makes power. It has a cooling loop. We’re going to make thermal power out of it. It’s going to have burnup. We have full shielding because we have full gamma production, we have, you know, full neutron flux and, you know, we even have helium filtration, we have activity monitoring on our cooling loop. Like, it’s the full thing.

Isaiah Taylor: 12:30 And cumulatively company history we raised less than $100 million. So that’s pretty extraordinary. Now, the question is like, how far does that go? By my best math today, I believe that the idiot index of nuclear is in the hundreds. Right? So the normal, like a good idiot index for a product, right? So idiot index being what’s the cost of the thing versus the cost of its constituent elements? So if you bought the elements on the commodity markets and it’s just added those numbers up versus the cost that you buy, that you bought it for, that you built it for. A good idiot index is somewhere around like 10 for like an industrial product. For a mass-manufactured commodity product, it’s, you know, it’s maybe something like six or seven. And nuclear’s in the hundreds. That’s, that’s kind of the best estimate I can come up with is like in the hundreds.

Isaiah Taylor: 13:22 So what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that the industry is formatted incorrectly. It’s formatted with a system of incentives where nobody’s incentivized to actually do this well. There are too many parties that benefit from costs increasing. Right? So our strategy at Valar is we do everything. We pick a patch of land, we clear it, we build a reactor, we design the reactor, we engineer the reactor, we manufacture it, we put it on the site, we plug it in, and then we operate it.

Isaiah Taylor: 13:55 And when we own that entire scope, we are incentivized to make it as effective as possible. We’re incentivized to say, ‘Does that thing really need to cost like a million dollars when it’s actually 50k, 50 grand of steel? Like, does that actually make sense? Does that thing need to cost $5 million when it you know you could replicate the same function with like a couple hundred thousand dollars of equipment?’ Like, those are the questions that just don’t really get asked in nuclear today because there are so many different parties and different vendors and different responsibilities fractured between design and engineering and EPC and operations. And at the end of the day, it’s the ratepayer, you know, who pays that cost, right? So taking this as a an entire market that we do well is really what’s going to fix that problem.

Ti Morse: 14:41 It’s a little bit like if Boeing made the plane, made the gasoline for the plane or the jet fuel for the plane, and then just made, you know, their optimization function was just on the ticket price.

Isaiah Taylor: 14:54 That’s right, and had their own airline. Well, what’s interesting about that is that that used to be the case. And we called that that airline was Trans World Airways. And The Department of Justice actually broke them up and said that you cannot be both an airplane manufacturer and an airline. And I think that was a huge mistake. I think that, um, that’s one of the ways that the aviation, aviation industry went wrong is that if you have an incredible aircraft design and you’re really good at manufacturing airplanes, it’s hard for you to benefit from that and you don’t get that final margin, right? So if you design an aircraft that is so safe that it doesn’t need pilots, you should be able to benefit from that as a aircraft manufacturer by selling tickets. But we actually can’t do that. So there’s a lot of structural problems in how industries are formatted that lead to things being more expensive. And I think people view nuclear as like an engineering problem, um, and it’s a little bit deeper than that. It’s a, it’s a complex coordination problem. You have to own engineering and design and manufacturing and operations and regulatory engagement and community engagement and talent and all these different things to deliver the cheapest possible power that we can.

Ti Morse: 16:03 I know for this reactor, you’re turning it on. It’s going to produce power. It’s not going to produce that much power, um, and the next one is going to produce significantly more. So in your mind when you were figuring out what are basically the requirements for our first version of this thing, what were those? And then what are you going to change for V2?

Isaiah Taylor: 16:25 Yeah. So the initial goal for this reactor is let’s become a nuclear company. Um, I did not allow Valar Atomics employees to refer to us as a nuclear company before we had actually split the first atom. Um, I don’t think that you should call yourself a nuclear company or a nuclear startup before you’ve split an atom.

Ti Morse: 16:39 Until then you’re a paper company?

Isaiah Taylor: 16:42 Yeah, it’s, uh, you know, this is a big problem in this industry. Like we, we talk a big talk and then we don’t ship product and, um, Valar needs to be different from that and so, you know, we actually I think like to understate what we’re up to and focus on building. So you’ll see this in, in the factory setting as well. We, we don’t call what we’re doing a factory. Like if you visit our facility in Hawthorne, we call it our facility. Um, even when we move into a much larger facility, we’ll call it a facility. We won’t call it a factory until it’s made at least two reactors of the same type. And, and that’s because we really just have this focus on we have to get back to reality, we have to get back to building and that’s really what the nuclear industry has been missing. We’ve been doing all sorts of things and we’ve been doing everything except just building reactors. And so that’s really the first step here and it’s that was the goal on this reactor is what is the smallest safest reactor that we can make that will actually make power. And, um, you don’t want it to be too small. Smallest here means, um, it’s small enough that it’s easy to build and easy to transport to our test site. Um, if you actually make it much smaller than this, reactors which are much smaller than this are actually harder to build. Um, there’s an interesting scaling law with the mean free path of a neutron where if you try to scale reactors down…

Isaiah Taylor: 18:00 down, the physics gets a lot harder and the materials get a lot harder. So, this is a pure graphite reactor. Uh, the core is entirely graphite. That massively simplifies a lot of things about building the reactor and analyzing the reactor. So, we basically said okay, what’s the size of the reactor that we know is small enough that it’s easy to build, it’s really, really safe, and that that architecture will scale to the final size. And that’s a really important part because we didn’t want to build the reactor in a really different way to how we’d build the eventual full-scale product. It’s, you know, if if we made choices on this scale that we’d then have to go relearn everything to go bigger, there’s not a whole lot of point in that. So, this reactor size is very carefully chosen for all of the methods used to build this scale very well up to a much, much more powerful reactor, but it’s small enough that it was easy for us to build quickly, it’s transportable, and it’s extremely safe.

Ti Morse: 18:57 There’s this kind of thing that you mentioned earlier where you want to make sure that if you’re saying, you know, something is a facility versus a factory, the reason that it’s a factory is because it’s actually produced, you know, multiple things. I think it’s really important not to lie to yourself. What other areas do people like very rarely lie to themselves and maybe even you like initially came in with those mentality and then had to like rewire your brain to say here’s the right thing to be going after?

Isaiah Taylor: 19:24 Yeah. Um, the second part of that requires me to do some self-reflection. Um, and so it might take me a second to answer because I went into and I’m sure there are things. But I went into this from honestly I was like, you know, you and I talked a little bit yesterday and I told you I started this company out of frustration. Like, frustration was probably the primary emotion going into starting this company. And it was from watching startup after startup after startup, um, quote-unquote become a nuclear startup, right? Like, you you get some people together, you raise some money, you get out there and I was so excited at every one, you know, growing up in high school watching these different companies get started and I was like where’s the reactor? And I’d I’d check in and I’d Google them and it’s like where’s the reactor? And for some of these companies we’re ten years down the road from those from me Googling that and there’s still no reactor, right? And if I had known back then that that was going to be the case about some of these companies, I mean, you know, I I maybe would have even started this company even sooner. But but I’m glad I’m glad that we did when we did. But yeah I watched that happen enough times it’s like okay, somebody needs to step into this with a mindset of um honestly backing all the way up and having a bit of humility to say we don’t really know how to build reactors in the United States anymore. Like, it looks like we do and some EPCs do know how to build uh like the AP1000, but advanced reactors, SMRs, you know, which I believe is is the form factor that will actually scale in in how the United States works today and how we manufacture things today, we actually don’t know.

Isaiah Taylor: 21:00 Like we have designs, we have ideas, we have theories, we don’t really know, uh, until we go and do it and, and build it. And so we just started the whole process and started the whole company with this idea that we don’t really know how to build a, an SMR. We don’t even really know how big an SMR is, we don’t know exactly what it looks like, and the manufacturing methods are going to teach us that.

Isaiah Taylor: 21:23 And so, yeah, I, I think that’s probably the, the biggest thing where people have been lying to themselves is everyone’s sort of thought we know how to do this. And, uh, I think this applies to many industries, but nuclear is one of the, one of the worst, but it applies to many industries that you don’t really know how to do it if you haven’t been doing it. Um, and so the, the shortest path is often to just start doing it. And that’s, that’s what we’ve done here and it’s, it’s led to very, very rapid progress faster than I think a lot of people thought was, was possible.

Ti Morse: 21:58 I know when Trump got elected, uh, things kind of flipped and in your mind you had like this opportunity that you didn’t know that you were going to have and with the, like passing of the nuclear executive orders, you kind of had you put gave yourself a deadline effectively or helped them, you know, structure it so you gave yourself a deadline of it roughly a year, right? How did you basically go from that to saying this is the critical path of all the, you know, steps that we have to take and the timeline, uh, at all to, to actually have this powered on by July 4th?

Isaiah Taylor: 22:29 Yeah, I mean it’s a great question and critical path is something that we, like, constantly obsess over at Valor. Like if there’s one over-repeated phrase at Valor, it’s probably critical path. Um, we actually designed some and built some custom software to help us try to understand this. It’s still very imperfect and we still struggle to understand the, the critical path, but that’s like, that’s actually the nature of reality is that it is very hard to understand the critical path and you actually just need to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about it and working on it and trying to understand it at all times, um, in order to be moving as fast as you can.

Isaiah Taylor: 23:05 I think companies are afraid to, to talk that way and this is one thing that I noticed in the early days is like exploring what the critical path is makes you look stupid because it’s like, bro, like, don’t you know what’s important to work on? Uh, and like, in early days, I felt that. Like, I, I was like, are my employees going to think I’m dumb because I’m asking like what’s important to work on right now? And like, yeah, maybe they did the first five times I asked that question. Uh, now they just think I’m annoying, which is better. Um, but yeah, like, we had to ask ourselves that over and over and over and we got it wrong a bunch of times and we got it right a bunch of times but the fact that we, we maniacally focus on it every morning and many times throughout the day and it’s what I think about morning and night and daytime is, is one of the things that contributes to, to the speed that we’re executing at. I think when we started off, uh, we believed…

Isaiah Taylor: 24:00 I think we believed that the construction was going to be the lead. I think we were surprised that a combination of building integration, let’s call it that, like how the reactor actually connects to the physical plant that’s here, ended up being like a lot harder than we expected. And and now we know that and now we know how to move even faster next time. There were a lot of regulatory things that I think nobody actually really knew, like even the DOE…

Isaiah Taylor: 24:29 …who’s been an incredible partner through this process, when these executive orders came out, you know, the people in the DOE who read the president’s order were like, how are we going to do this? Like what is our critical path to even imagining these things happening by July 4th? And so yeah, it’s been like a constant race and like the answer changes every week, but the ability of a team to focus on that is incredibly important.

Ti Morse: 24:55 You said something on our walk outside that I thought was very interesting, which was the reactor is not actually that hard to build and like even creating fuel is not that hard to do. What is the hard thing to do?

Isaiah Taylor: 25:10 Yeah. So there’s a lot of extraordinary engineering projects that go on in the world and in the United States. Like rockets are insanely hard. Rockets are like legitimately wildly difficult pieces of technology and engineering. I think I read that the… someone’s going to like comment on YouTube about how I’m an idiot, but like I think I read that the Raptor thrust chamber…

Isaiah Taylor: 25:29 …is like 300 bar something like that. That’s pretty crazy. And uh like yeah that’s like a properly hard thing because if anything goes wrong, the whole rocket just blows up, right? So you have like extremely high pressure systems and you’re mass limited. You don’t just get to like throw a bunch of mass at it. So like rockets are properly hard. Nuclear reactors are pretty simple. You have a pressure tank and you have a moderator inside of the tank and you have uranium inside of the moderator.

Isaiah Taylor: 25:54 And then you basically just need to flow a working fluid and extract that heat. And what’s really interesting about nuclear reactors is that they will make as much heat as you pull out of them. Super counterintuitive thing that even I find that even people in nuclear don’t actually have a counterintuitive… or don’t have an intuitive feeling of this. But nuclear reactors will just make whatever power you pull out. So if you’re able to flow a fluid through a reactor core at a higher and higher speed…

Isaiah Taylor: 26:22 …it will match the amount of power because reactors have a what’s called a thermal feedback of reactivity. So if you flow more fluid through the core, it will drop the temperature and the reactivity will go up. And so really the the task is just flow fluid through a nuclear core. Now there’s all sorts of things you have to do to make sure that it’s safe and make sure that you get it right. A lot of those things you can actually just address in the design space. But from a mechanical perspective, this is…

Isaiah Taylor: 26:50 …actually quite simple.

Isaiah Taylor: 27:00 I would argue simpler than a high-performance engine. Like it’s simpler than, you know, honestly like a V8 engine that’s in a high-performance car. And especially at the scale that those are manufactured and the tolerance they’re manufactured at and and these sorts of things. So what’s really going on here in nuclear is that you need to do all this engineering and you need to get it right while getting like 10 other things right. And that’s where it’s like the complexity, right? You have to get the you have to get the the regulatory really, really right. You have to get construction right. These things have to go well on a schedule. And in the face of all of that, you have to operate in an industry that just doesn’t believe in going fast anymore. That is one of the the biggest challenges that we face every single day is like I love the nuclear industry, I’ve been, you know, watching heroes move in the nuclear industry for decades and a lot of those heroes really dislike me, like really genuinely, genuinely dislike me.

Ti Morse: 28:02 This almost sounds like the Elon thing where he talked with like I think some astronauts or something and they were like private commercial space shouldn’t exist.

Isaiah Taylor: 28:10 Yep. Yep. Yep. One of my heroes as well actually, a couple of my heroes in the Apollo missions really, really disliked Elon as well, although I think they made up eventually, which is great.

Isaiah Taylor: 28:22 Yeah, so I mean that’s the nature of any very like disruptive mover in technology is that the existing people there are not going to get what you’re doing. And I would just appeal to the past straight, I would look back to the early days of nuclear and say the first nuclear projects were very rapid, right? They were safe, but they were fast. So Chicago Pile 1, Chicago Pile 2, X10, all of the work at Oak Ridge where my great-grandfather was, these things did not take five years or 10 years or 15 years. And obviously there were some mistakes made in the early nuclear program, you had some fatal accidents with plutonium at Los Alamos. Those had more to do with the weapon side and less to do with the reactor side. You had SL1 in Idaho, so there have been fatal incidents and you do have to take nuclear safety very seriously and you have to take industrial safety very seriously. But this is not unlike other industries, right? Rockets also explode, you know, cars crash when you’re doing test drives. And so it’s a it’s part of the category of humans build difficult things and we deal with kinetic systems and we overcome hard challenges. So, you know, slow and safe are not the same thing, right? In fact, I would argue that the faster that an industry moves, the safer it can become. Because if you have a fast-moving industry, it can push through all of these questions that they resolve in a safer way, right? So you say how do we make this pump safer? Well, your speed of iteration is going to determine whether or not you get to answer that question. And once you know the answer to that question, your speed of iteration is going to impact whether or not you actually implement that change.

Isaiah Taylor: 30:00 to get to deploy that in the field, right? So, a good example of that, this plant back here, I would argue this is orders of magnitude safer than the other nuclear power plants in the United States that are light-water plants. Now, light-water plants are still very, very safe to be clear, but this one’s like orders of magnitude safer. And as a company that is moving quickly, if we’re able to move fast enough, we actually get to go deploy that, and that makes everyone safer, right? The fact that we get to take this safer technology to market is a function of our speed, and that will make everyone safer. So slow and safe are simply not the same thing.

Ti Morse: 30:35 Yeah, I think it goes from effectively like, the safest thing is just no thing. And then if you’re going to have something, the safest thing is you do it a whole lot and you get really, really good at it because you’re iterating so much.

Isaiah Taylor: 30:45 That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. Once you’ve decided that you need energy, which we do need energy, then doing it often and doing it iteratively and rapidly is actually the safest way to do it.

Ti Morse: 30:56 Yesterday I was talking with you, and I kind of gave this analogy of some of the other companies are basically kicking a ball into a goal, and you’re trying to play the entire game of soccer. Because if you just learn how to kick the ball into the goal, you’re missing a lot of it.

Isaiah Taylor: 31:12 100%, yeah.

Ti Morse: 31:13 Why is it so important to just vertically integrate basically the entire business and make sure that Valor Atomics is just running the entire operation?

Isaiah Taylor: 31:21 Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah, other nuclear companies have many different types of business models and partnerships and places that they want to play in the stack. Our responsibility as a company is to make energy as cheap as we possibly can. I want to make energy 10 times cheaper than it is today, and then I want to make it 10 times cheaper again after that. And that is a responsibility that we take seriously. We don’t get to say, ‘Oh, sorry, the reactor’s not going to get any cheaper because that pump just, you know, those suppliers just charge a lot of money for that pump.’ Like, we don’t get to make that excuse. We go make the pump if that’s the case, right? A good example of this is our control rod drive units. So control rods are tough. They’re really important. It’s super important that you be able to shut down a nuclear reactor on command. And so this is like super important stuff to get right. In the normal way to deal with this is that you go buy control rod drive units and control rods because there are vendors out there who have built them. And when we went out to the market and we said, ‘Hey, we need to buy some control rod drive units and some control rods,’ we got quotes back that said 18 months and 24 months and 36 months. And we came back and we said, ‘Well, this plant needs to turn on in a year, and so that’s not happening.’ And not only that, but they can’t get delivered the day the reactor’s supposed to turn on. There’s got to be some integration and test. And so we ended up making the control rod drive units ourselves. And we expected it to be very hard, and it was very hard. We went through probably 40 major iterations of those control rod drive units, running them thousands of times up and down in our helium pressure chamber. We have a test stand back in Hawthorne that we can get up to full nuclear temperatures and pressures in helium. And I mean, that thing is just running up and down day and night and we…

Isaiah Taylor: 33:00 We’re discovering failure modes and we’re discovering wear patterns and we’re improving the design and we’re, you know, fixing the electronics system and the motor controller and all of this stuff that you never think about. And that really is the only way to do it. That is the only way to win is that you take responsibility for the entirety of the system. Another good example of this I would say, very different from what we just talked about in technology is community engagement. So community engagement is something that we take extremely seriously at Valor. Um, I would - I would like to say, you know, just to brag on my team a little bit, I would like to say that we take community engagement 10 times more seriously than any other nuclear company. When we go and pick a place to build, we spend an inordinate amount of time on the ground with that community before we go set up shop. Um, we get to know people, we get to know the city council, you know, half the - you know, the people sitting in that office over there like know the city council by name and the neighbors by name and the people in the community and the business leaders and they’ve been to the meetings and they’ve hosted the cookouts. And again, we’re not showing up to say, hey, like, here’s this company, you should get to know us because we’re building a nuclear reactor in your backyard. We say, what do you guys think about us building a nuclear reactor here? Would you like that? Here’s the costs, here’s the benefits, we think that the benefits are enormous. But honestly, we’re also a startup and we could fail. Like, we could run out of money, that’s very possible. And - and so, you know, you could help us out for the next year and we could go bankrupt and, you know, all those jobs that you thought were going to come out of that might not happen, right? We’re going to be honest about that. Um, but if it works out, like, this could be a really exciting thing for your community. What do you think about that? And um, that has paid dividends for us. But if we kind of went into this with an attitude of, you know, we just make the reactors, right? We’re just reactor guys. That’s what we do. We just make reactors. Um, you know, we would’ve gotten slapped down, right? So you have to - you have to look at the entire picture and the goal is make the cheapest energy that we can. Um, and anything that falls under that scope, anything that blocks, you know, that pathway, is our responsibility to fix.

Ti Morse: 35:02 Yesterday you were talking about this idea of most reactor companies are basically trying to design this beautiful thing that looks like a Ferrari and you’re trying to design the Toyota Camry that Toyota just makes like a million of them a year. Why is that so important?

Isaiah Taylor: 35:20 It’s so important because the goal is to bring the cost of the nuclear plant down. That’s the first thing that you need to do in nuclear. If you look at the cost of nuclear, right, the overarching goal of the company is we’re going to make energy 10 times cheaper. And nuclear fission is the way to do that based on the physics. Uh, but if you look at the cost of nuclear, most of the cost is the plant itself, right? Uranium’s very cheap, operations are pretty cheap. It’s actually the plant itself that costs the money. So you need to make the plant cheaper. And there’s two philosophies on how you do that. One is you design this perfect machine which makes so much power that no matter how hard it was and how complicated

Isaiah Taylor: 36:00 it wasn’t a matter how long it takes, it was going to be worth it because it’s going to make 1.2 gigawatts, right? That’s that’s one philosophy. The other philosophy is actually the way that you make anything cheap is you make it in a factory. Factories are places where cheap things come out, right? There factories are are buildings where things go to become free. Right? Uh, you know, and and so nuclear reactors need to go to factories to become to become free. Uh, in a factory setting, you have the opportunity to continuously ask the question, why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? Right? In a factory setting, you have the same group of smart people on the floor watching something happen, and, you know, that 22 year old kid, you know, straight out of college who’s never seen this factory line before, steps in and, you know, this has happened before, and she’s like, why do what’s going why do we do that? And then, you know, the answer’s like, ah, well, because I actually don’t know, why do we do that? And then you chase that that thread down and you realize we don’t need to do this at all, right? If you are always doing traditional style plant construction, you don’t learn those lessons because in the 10 years that it took you to build the thing, half those people retired. Right? You don’t even get to to have those learnings. So the goal is to to make nuclear reactors something that are repeatedly built and you could start to bring these costs down. You could vertically integrate, you can do things better than you did yesterday and that mass manufacturing is eventually how we’re going to make things cheap. So once you’ve decided that that’s what you’re going to do, well how do you design the reactor? And the answer is that you should trade off everything for simplicity and safety. Um, I really believe that’s the answer. You can trade off efficiency, you can trade off power density, you can trade off some aspects of size, but you cannot trade off simplicity or safety because those are the two things that are going to allow you to mass replicate. And the mass replication is fundamentally what will allow us to take nuclear from an industry that builds nuclear reactors for $7,000 a kilowatt to $15,000 a kilowatt all the way down to a thousand and then even below that.

Ti Morse: 38:07 Jeff Bezos has this awesome line where he compares like one-way doors versus two-way doors, one-way doors you walk through it and you can’t walk back out, two-way doors you walk through and you can walk back and it’s no no problem. Yeah. For the one-way door decisions that you’re making, how do you kind of make those decisions and make sure that it doesn’t completely fuck up your timelines and critical path?

Isaiah Taylor: 38:26 Yeah. Um, this is something that I’ve actually thought about for a long time. I guess I read that on social media like a 8 or 9 years ago when that was sort of going around as a as a Bezosism and I’m very grateful to him for it because it’s a really good framework. And the idea here is that you run as fast as you can through two-way doors and you take your time and deliberate on on one-way doors. Super useful framework for making decisions. The problem is we also have to run really fast through the one-way doors. Like like we at we are at the place that we are at as a company because we have sprinted through some one-way doors. And uh, you know, there’s a bit of…

Isaiah Taylor: 39:00 Like instinct here and just you know make it work. Um that’s that’s happened. I think a lot of it is you have to think all the way back to the fundamentals. Um I think that people don’t really read laws that much. Um like they don’t really read laws and regulations, but you can read this stuff, right? Like it’s out there. Um and actually now there’s like Claude so you could even go faster with you know OpenAI and Claude and ChatGPT and these things.

Isaiah Taylor: 39:27 But even before that, you know, the laws were out there and the regs were out there you can go and read them and there’s a lot of stuff that you can just boil down to the fundamentals of like why can’t we do this faster and you read the regs and it’s like, well, actually the regs say you can or they don’t say you can’t. Um but people just kind of haven’t been and and actually I’ll say one one big advantage that Valar has is we don’t flinch when it comes to risking large amounts of capital on things that really matter.

Isaiah Taylor: 39:54 Um I’m really giving away some of the secrets right now, but I don’t think that anyone is going to you know suddenly overnight gather the risk tolerance that we have in this area so I could say it out loud.

Ti Morse: 40:01 But as someone that also risks a huge amount of capital with listen in, like you have to you have to swing big.

Isaiah Taylor: 40:05 And when you’re working on a problem of this importance, right? I genuinely believe that this team is working on the most important problem in the world. We are working on making energy ten times cheaper. It’s hard to imagine a more important problem than that. When you’re working on a problem like that, you’re going to have to take some big swings.

Isaiah Taylor: 40:19 And some of those swings are going to be zero or one swings where you know if you spent forty million dollars on that site and it didn’t work out, you’re out of the game, right? But guess what? I took that swing and you know another party didn’t and now they’re behind, right?

Isaiah Taylor: 40:34 So that is uh it’s a high stakes game but you have to play it, right? And especially if you want to build the most important things in the world, like if you want to actually change the nature of how humanity consumes energy uh and you can’t get yourself over that level of decision making and aren’t ready to just absolutely barrel through a couple one-way doors, you know I’m going to go faster than you.

Ti Morse: 40:52 If you are full steaming it through all these one-way doors, you also have to be incredibly good at basically pulling rabbits out of hats when things don’t work. And so what are the best examples of you pulling rabbits out of a hat um and how do you actually do that?

Isaiah Taylor: 41:04 Alright, so a lot of the the rabbits that we’ve been able to pull out of hats I obviously can’t talk about. There’s some amazing stories that we’ll tell someday, but one that I that I will talk about just one small example. Um it was very important to us to demonstrate that we could move this reactor via C-17. Uh we built it to be containerized, we built it under the weight specs of the maximum load of a C-17, we engineered the plant to be able to take those g-loads and stresses, but none of this matters if you don’t actually fly it.

Isaiah Taylor: 42:00 So we were like, “We want to actually fly this thing.” And we wouldn’t, you know, we spent a lot of time with the Department of War on the logistics of how that’s going to work. We did a bunch of studies with them on the loads of a C-17 and worked with loadmasters on, “Okay, what is this plant going to experience in flight?” We did engineering studies on our side to figure out, “Is the plant going to survive the transportation?” You know, we had people, you know, who were worried for us in the Department of Energy that, “Are you sure you guys really want to fly this thing?” because like, “We don’t want this plant to break and you’re part of our pilot program, like, we want you guys to go critical, like, that would, you know, if you snap an important component.” And we’re like, “Yep, we know, but listen, like, this is a really important thing for us to demonstrate that we can do this.” So we get through all this work, right? And it’s months of analysis, months of engineering, reengineering on the plant, refabrication of things that weren’t going to take the G-loads, you know, hundreds of people within the Department of War that coordinated that operation. And we get to three days left until we fly, right? The Secretary of Energy’s going to be flying with us, the Undersecretary of War’s going to be flying with us, the CTO of the United States is going to be flying with us. We have some senators on board, we’re meeting the governor down there. The stakes are pretty high, right? We get a call from the loadmaster at the base where we’re going to take off from, and he says, “Guys, the loader truck that is supposed to load your reactor onto the C-17 cannot take the loads of this vessel. Your vessel is too heavy for the loader truck.”

Ti Morse: 43:26 And I think this was actually two days before.

Isaiah Taylor: 43:28 And so we all start getting on the phone and we start calling all around, “Who has a high enough capacity loader truck?” And it turns out, okay, there actually are high-capacity loader trucks, and it’s normal for a base to have these high-capacity loader trucks, but, you know, maintenance cycles, whatever it was, we just happened to not have one at this base at that time. And we’re like, “Okay, can we drive one up?” and we start thinking about the logistics of how do we move the assets around and, you know, time is ticking. And the problem is that we need to actually try and do a test-fit up of this. So even if we got a truck in time the day of, we’re not sure that it would work for other reasons, right? We have to do a test run. And so, our steel team got together and said, “What if we just built a truck with 48 hours’ notice?” And they started working on it, they started drafting. We took the existing specs of the truck, we took the existing specs of the vessel, and started fabricating. And there’s these specialty rollers that, you know, have to get integrated into the surface, and they have to take a certain amount of load, and these are loaded onto pallets, and you have to integrate with those pallets, and we basically just said, “Start sending us engineering drawings”, right? And so we got into: okay, what’s the exact interface between the pallet loading system and the…

Isaiah Taylor: 45:00 The base wheeling system and the motor and how do we basically bridge that gap in in 24 hours. And literally 24 hours later we had fabricated a truck that we then used to load our nuclear reactor on a C-17. Probably one of the most ridiculous works of rapid engineering and fabrication in history and literally like we were flying in these rollers like you have to like we had to go buy these rollers and you have to weld them into the lines so they could actually roll the the pallets onto it and yeah many many all-nighters pulled throughout that process and 48 hours from a mission having that come up.

Isaiah Taylor: 45:53 So honestly a lot of having the ability to pull rabbits out of hats is having a team that is utterly relentless. And we have a team that is utterly relentless. When I look at you know the all the different people in the world who are working on nuclear and working in nuclear, I have a lot of respect for many of the teams out there and you know obviously nuclear’s a big market there’s there’s a lot of room for all of us but when I look at the relentlessness of our of this team, it is incomparable and it’s the most exciting job in the world to work with them.

Ti Morse: 46:14 With everything about this, you’re trying to basically figure out what is the most aggressive timeline that you can reasonably I think achieve and then make sure that you hit it. And I think you’re constantly running in the background are we actually going to hit it? Like are we on track to do that?

Isaiah Taylor: 46:27 Yep.

Ti Morse: 46:28 When things go wrong and you the timeline slips or you predict that it could slip,

Isaiah Taylor: 46:29 Yep.

Ti Morse: 46:31 things don’t go your way, what does going into wartime mode and war room look like?

Isaiah Taylor: 46:46 My Chief of Staff is laughing over here because she knows what war looks what wartime looks like. Yeah I mean I think like to some extent you have to you have to keep you have to keep cool and gather information like it sounds super boring but like I try to understand the total information state as precisely as I possibly can. I really you know really hate people who do not tell you what is going on in extreme detail. I hate generalities. People know this about me like I do not want a generic answer to any question. I want the most precise answer that you can possibly give and if that takes you 30 seconds to give me an answer to a one-word question, that’s okay.

Isaiah Taylor: 47:33 That’s probably like one of the only fireable offense, but it’s not the only fireable offense, but it’s one of the only fireable offenses of working with me is like giving non-precise answers. If you don’t have the detail, that’s also a detail that I need right? It’s like I ask a question and you give a detail or you say I actually don’t know the answer to that question and so then we go together to ask the person and we follow that chain all the way down to what the actual root truth is. I have a friend Josh Steinman who actually

Isaiah Taylor: 48:00 Today was – now you’ll know when we’re recording this, but today was appointed to the Department of War’s board of technologists, I don’t remember the exact acronym. Great guy and he likes to say, nothing in the world takes more than 15 minutes, it’s just whose 15 minutes. Awesome, awesome line. And this is really true about like diagnosing problems. Like, there is somebody in the world who knows the problem and who knows what’s wrong, and it will probably take 15 minutes to fix, but you have to know who it is, and you have to be relentless in finding out who it is and getting to them.

Isaiah Taylor: 48:30 So, yeah, we, you know, going to war for us means like, spend an inordinate amount of time getting to know the actual truth of the situation to the ground level of reality. And then honestly, like once you know the situation, you know what you have to what you have to do, like, it is being willing to do unreasonable things. We have done some unreasonable things on this on this site in the last couple of months.

Ti Morse: 49:02 What are the best examples?

Isaiah Taylor: 49:04 One example, you know, that I’ll give is to credit my nuclear review team here, my nuclear licensing team. You know, this is a hard thing to do, like going from a patch of dirt in September to a nuclear plant ready to make power sitting here in July is an enormous challenge, and it’s especially big because we actually have power operations that we’re planning for here and it’s not a DOE – it didn’t start as a DOE site and so there’s all these layers of complexity have to come through. And a couple months ago, we realized that, you know, again, in I think it was like in a stand-up, we started asking like, okay, what’s critical path to this, what’s critical path to that, we started to realize that there’s this area of our licensing process like nobody really had a good understanding of. And so we started to pull on that thread and pull on that thread and within about an hour, we realized that there was a huge gaping hole in our work product that was imminently due in order to stay on timeline. And so we called a war room. There is a trailer just over there, so if you walk like 200 feet that way, there’s like a construction trailer. And we said, clear out the trailer, set up chairs, set up a screen, and call in everybody who is not working on hardware critical path. People who have nothing to do with nuclear operation, people who, you know, have nothing to do with engineering, people who are working in accounting, our photographer, like literally everybody. We are all going to sit in this room and we are just not going to stop working on this problem and asking the question of how do we solve the next problem until it is done. And the people who have no context on the plant, they’re not going to be able to answer the technical questions, but they’re going to be able to coordinate, right? And they’re going to be able to say, has this question been answered? Have we really understood what the regulation is saying here? Can we

Isaiah Taylor: 51:00 find somebody who knows the answer to that question and, um, it was, it was over a weekend. I made this call on, uh, I think it was a Friday morning and, uh, the war room wrapped up on a Tuesday morning. Uh, so, yeah, it’s a maniacal search of truth and then being willing to do unreasonable things to fix problems.

Ti Morse: 51:20 This morning we were driving in your car and I was kind of talking with you about like urgency and timelines and being maniacally urgent. And I really believe that if you look at someone like Elon, he’s effectively this injector of urgency in all of his companies. He like unfucks bottlenecks and then injects urgency. So with this sort of thing, how are you thinking about like injecting as much urgency as possible in the right places?

Isaiah Taylor: 51:52 Yeah. Elon is like probably the greatest to ever do this, right? Like he, he, he injects urgency into things that are not even his, right? Like, uh, when he just sort of gets into an industry or gets into an area, things just start moving faster because, uh, he’s able to just like show people that you can move faster. I think that’s one of the most useful talents in the world and one of the most useful skills in the world. Um, because the fact is, if you boil down the work of any project in every company, if you could attack every single one of those tasks, right? Imagine just you could list out every single piece of work that has to get done in order to go to the moon, let’s say, and you could list those out and you could attack each one with fresh urgency and fresh energy, you could compress timelines to a degree that I don’t think most people really know or understand, right? And so the goal is how do you like how do you get build an organization that does that naturally? And I think there’s a certain extent to which no organization will do that perfectly. But honestly, it’s just a lot of what we hire for. And it’s a lot of like why people join Valar. Like a lot of people join Valar because they have been wat… they’ve loved nuclear for a long time, they think that nuclear is the right way to reindustrialize the United States, they think that it’s the only way that we’re going to be able to get cheap power back in the US, maybe they’re doing it because they want to stop carbon emissions and from continuing to raise the PPM level and they care about climate change, whatever the reason is for joining the company, they know that Valar is the place that they will be able to run as fast as they can and that they’ll be surrounded by people who are trying to move as fast as they can. This is one of the I think the least replicable and hardest to change aspects of a company’s culture. Um, you can fix many different things about a company culture, you can make the marketing better, um, you can even increase the talent of the engineering team, you can fix your finances, you can make your FP&A processes better. But pace is I think one of the only things that you can’t change about a company and or at least let’s say that you can’t improve about a company.

Isaiah Taylor: 54:00 You can certainly make it worse. Um, you can take a high-paced company and make it slow. It’s very, very hard to make a slow-moving company fast. Um, I would argue nine times out of ten it’s easier to start a whole new company than to try to take a slow-moving company and make it fast. So it’s just, you know, it’s something that we take extraordinarily seriously. Um, it’s something that we hire for, it’s a reason that people come to us.

Ti Morse: 54:24 Is there anything specific on the kind of company level that enables the team to be designed in a way where they can, you know, move with extreme urgency and speed?

Isaiah Taylor: 54:33 Yeah, so one of these things, again, we we have custom software for this actually that we’ve designed around giving the entire company visibility into what is the most important work at any given time. Um, we have a screen up in our office that shows in big red letters what is the most important work in the company at a given time. Now of course all the work in the company’s important, and this is I think one of the one of the reasons that companies don’t like talking about the critical path. They fear that if they’re always talking about the critical path then all the other work will will get undone and people won’t think it’s as important. And, uh, actually the critical path changes so much that like that’s not a big deal because people will be like, ‘Okay, maybe I’m not critical path today, but I probably will be tomorrow because that team is going to go fix that problem and they’re going to figure out how to move faster.’ So that’s one big thing. Um, the other thing is like we just culturally talk about it constantly. And and I like to do this by thinking about the future state that I care about, right? I want Valor to be in a position where we are turning on nuclear reactors every hour, right? So I want to turn on 24 reactors a day. And if I’m going to turn on 24 reactors a day, what needs to be true for that to happen and what’s stopping us? Right? And if you think about it that way, it starts to become clear what’s stopping us, right? Well, what’s stopping us is like we don’t even know how to turn on one. Like, oh, okay, well how do we turn on one? Well, we don’t have a site. Okay, well we need to get a site, right? We don’t have a, you know, a reactor standing there in thermal testing. Okay, well we need to get a reactor in thermal testing as fast as we possibly can. Well, you need to get a reactor in thermal testing? Well, I mean the hardest part of that’s probably going to be the circulation system and the pressure system and the control rod drive units. So we should probably go get that system designed and in fabrication as fast as we possibly can. Oh, the machine shops in LA take too long to go and make these parts? Well, you better have a two and a half million dollar machine shop standing there in a month, right? Okay, so there’s the critical path compared to, you know, where we were about 18 months ago. Um, so yeah, and like a huge part of this is, it really is cultural. Um, the whole the whole team and the whole company has to think this way all the time. Um, and it’s very uncomfortable. It’s weird to think this way. You want to just think in your own box, you want to think in waterfalls, uh, but you have to think holistically. Everyone has to think about the whole company and what is going to make us move the fastest.

Ti Morse: 56:57 Initially you were going to go to the Philippines and build some reactors… Dr. out there. I mean, suddenly, Trump gets elected, bring nuclear back to America, and then at the same time, data centers absolutely start ripping and AI takes off. What was it like kind of going through that transition inside the company and how did you kind of like reset your own North Star in order to make sure that it was aligned?

Isaiah Taylor: 57:19 Yeah, I don’t think we reset the North Star. The North Star is make energy 10 times cheaper. And the Philippines was originally the right place to go about that. And when these executive orders came out, the Department of Energy said, you know, we’re open for business and we’re going to do this in a year. And that became the very obvious thing to do. And honestly, in a day we went from the Philippines is the plan to we’re going to Utah. And you know, it’s just a huge credit to the team that they can roll like that. Because again, because the North Star didn’t change, right? Because the North Star has always been we need to turn a reactor on and we need hardware experience and we need to get under pressure and we need to get at temperature and we need to be splitting atoms and we need to be making shielding and doing nuclear construction and all of these things. And so what’s the fastest way to do that? That’s always been the plan. And so when the conditions on the ground change, the team needs to know that you have to be able to pivot and move into whatever avenue is going to accomplish the goal the fastest. I’m sure things are going to pivot in all sorts of unexpected ways for us right now, right? But we will continue relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10 times cheaper.

Ti Morse: 58:32 The first time that I met you, I think I woke up, I was sleeping on top of, you know, a- this lab at Rainmaker. I woke up, I take off my sleep mask and I see you walking across the floor on the phone, hustling. And I’m like, this guy is crazy. And then I went back to sleep and then I woke up a little bit later and suddenly you were going the other direction also on the phone. And I just remember that version of Isaiah and you haven’t honestly changed that much. You’re still getting after it. But what has changed over the course of the last two and a half years? How has Isaiah evolved?

Isaiah Taylor: 59:03 I have come to gain massive, massive respect for amazing technology leaders and technologists in this company. It’s not that, you know, it’s really just like you don’t know what it’s going to feel like until you do it. And to stand here and like look at the reactor that the team has built and to think about the insane hours and effort and blood, sweat, and tears that have been put into this and that they just come back every single morning with energy and ambition and ready to completely rethink it when the time comes and to take the next step, like, I don’t know, it just is- I hoped to see that, but actually seeing that in your team is one of the most rewarding feelings on earth. I had a theory about…

Isaiah Taylor: 1:00:00 About how the the nuclear industry was structured but I wasn’t sure yet. Um, and now I’m like a lot more confident about it, which is that a lot of people in the nuclear industry really do want to go fast. And they just not have been, they haven’t been given the avenue to do that. I meet people in the nuclear industry all the time who, you know, look at what we’re doing, uh, you know, with, with envy because they’re like, I’ve been working for 20 years in nuclear and I haven’t seen an advanced reactor turn on yet, right? I worked on this design, I worked on that design, I worked on this study, and you guys are about to turn one on, right? Um, and so I’ve learned that, yes, there are deep problems in how the nuclear industry is formatted but like there are a huge amount of people who want to go fast. Um, and so, you know, that’s, that’s a powerful thing that we get to do is, is unlock those people and let them run.

Ti Morse: 1:00:51 It’s important to talk about safety and like why, what makes reactors dangerous and also what makes like this sort of thing very safe. Yeah. Can you talk about the sizing and how everything works?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:01:03 Yeah, so there’s like let’s break down what nuclear safety is and why. Fundamentally, nuclear safety is about making sure that the public and workers don’t get dosed with radiation above acceptable thresholds. Everyone is always dosed with radiation all the time, you and I are currently getting dosed with radiation just because the sky’s above us and the ground is beneath us and these, you know, these things are radioactive. So it’s about making sure that we don’t get dosed with radiation above acceptable levels. And, the way that would happen in a nuclear reactor if you were not careful is that when uranium splits, it forms a variety of what we call daughter products. So a uranium atom will break apart and now you have fragments of what used to be a uranium atom and is now a bunch of other random atoms. And those, those atoms are radioactive. They produce gamma rays. Those gamma rays at enough dose are harmful to your body and could kill you. So there’s the sort of, okay, gamma rays are coming from the reactor while it’s running and so you need to make sure that you stay a certain distance from it and that you shield those rays. And then there’s the issue of, and really this is what nuclear safety comes down to, how do we make sure that those fission products stay inside the reactor where they are controlled? Right? So the ultimate goal of nuclear safety is make sure that those fission products stay in a controlled state inside of the core. What you don’t want is for those reactive, you know, those radioactive fission products to, you know, be distributed into the air or into the water or into the next, you know, the field next door. How do you do that? Well, there’s sort of two ways that, there’s two sort of aspects you have to think about in terms of nuclear safety. The first is how do you make sure that the fission reaction itself is controlled? Right? So you in, inside of a nuclear core you have uranium, you’re trying to create…

Ti Morse: 1:03:00 A chain reaction, right? So one uranium atom splits, it creates roughly two neutrons. Those two can go cause two more fissions, now you have four neutrons. Those four go cause four fissions, now you have eight neutrons. 16, 32, 64, 128, right? So you have an exponential growth of neutrons. And each time a fission event happens, you have heat production. And that’s the principle of nuclear energy, right? We use that heat for useful things.

Ti Morse: 1:03:27 Now the danger is that an exponential growth function is exponential. And so you need that curve to taper, right? You need to get up to a certain rate of fission and then go no further so that you don’t have an exponential growth of heat. And so that’s the first principle of nuclear safety is reactivity control.

Ti Morse: 1:03:46 Now reactivity control has many factors. There are lots of different ways to control the rate of reactivity, but in traditional nuclear power plants, the control rods are the main way to control reactivity.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:03:59 I hesitate to talk negatively about the traditional nuclear industry because the fact is traditional nuclear is the safest form of energy on earth. Even with all the flaws I’m about to describe, it is still the safest energy on earth. But, I think we could do a lot better. In traditional nuclear, the control rods are really, really important. Right? If you run, you know, take those rods all the way out and you’re not able to put them back in to shut the reaction down, the plant can get into a very dangerous state where you’re producing much more energy than you can safely handle and that can lead to an explosion. Now we do a lot of engineering and they’ve done a lot of engineering to make sure that that’s not possible and they use other effects like Doppler broadening in U-238 to moderate that, but it’s still, you know, a piece of engineering that you have to treat very carefully and get right.

Ti Morse: 1:04:23 This type of reactor is actually totally different. We do have control rods here, but the control rods are actually not for nuclear safety, they’re for plant shutdown. So this is a really interesting thing. The way that we guarantee that this reactor maintains a reactivity level that is not going to result in a runaway reaction or meltdown is actually through the inherent physics of the plant itself.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:04:54 And how that works is that as Uranium-238 heats up—the 238, by the way, is the non-fissile isotope of uranium, so there’s 235 and 238, and 238 is the one that doesn’t split, and there’s always a bunch of 238 in every reactor, this is what uranium enrichment is, you enrich up to a certain percent but not all of it—and as Uranium-238 heats up, it actually captures neutrons more effectively. And so there’s actually this natural response curve where the hotter the reactor gets, the less reactive it gets. And so it’s a self-regulating principle.

Ti Morse: 1:05:26 And specifically in a graphite reactor, graphite has really, really high thermal inertia and it’s really good at spreading that heat out.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:06:00 thermally conductive, and so, when you have this growth of neutron flux and you have this growth of heat, that heat rapidly gets spread out and you have this moderating effect in the Doppler broadening, and then actually the graphite itself also becomes worse at scattering neutrons back into the core. So, what we call this is you have strongly negative thermal feedback of reactivity. And what that means is there’s a very strong negative relationship between temperature and reactivity. As the reactor core gets hotter, it gets significantly less reactive.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:06:31 And that’s all physics. We don’t have to do anything in the plant control to make that true. It just happens because of physics. So, again, we have control rods to make sure that we can shut the reactor down. But if the control rods broke for whatever reason and got frozen and, you know, they’re gravity-fed, so, you know, if the plant turns off or loses power, they’ll just drop into the core. But let’s say for some crazy reason the control rods get stuck up, that is not going to lead to a runaway event. So that’s the first aspect of nuclear safety.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:06:57 The second aspect of nuclear safety is meltdown. So, most people don’t know this, but meltdown is actually something that generally happens after a reactor has been turned off. So, it’s a post-shutdown meltdown. This is what happened in Three Mile Island and Fukushima. A meltdown is when you’ve already turned the reactor off, the rods are down, but there’s still heat being produced in the core.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:07:23 And that’s because after uranium splits, you still have recently split daughter products, back to these fission products, that are unstable isotopes of various atoms and they are themselves still decaying into other things. And they produce heat when they do that. And so, after you turn a reactor off, you still have about 7% of the active heat production still present in decay heat. And it goes down to about a percent and it kind of tapers off over about a 24-hour period.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:07:54 And so immediately after shutdown in a traditional nuclear power plant, in order to prevent that heat from just building up to an unacceptable level, you have to keep running the cooling loop. So, in a normal nuclear reactor after shutdown, you actually keep running the pumps and you keep pulling that heat out for about 24 hours after shutdown. And that’s the condition of failure that leads to what we call nuclear meltdown. When those pumps fail, for instance, in Fukushima, the backup generators were flooded from a tsunami, right? The cooling pumps fail, the heat starts to build up because you still have fission product decay heat.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:08:30 And eventually those temperatures exceed the structural temperatures in the core and you have any number of things happening including the pressure boundary can get breached due to high temperatures and you can have steam escape that’s radioactive and all these sorts of things. So, how do we avoid that? Well, when I said at the beginning that this plant is 100 times safer than existing nuclear power plant, what I mean is we already talked about thermal runaway, right? So, this has a very strongly negative…

Ti Morse: 1:09:00 …thermal feedback of reactivity.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:09:01 But it is also incapable of meltdown through decay heat and what that means is there’s a certain amount of decay heat in the core, but the reactor’s also just really small and it’s made of graphite. And the fact that it’s small and made of graphite are massive advantages.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:09:18 The first advantage is being made of graphite. Graphite has very high thermal inertia. So as this decay heat gets released from the fission products, it starts heating up the graphite. And it turns out that most of the decay heat is actually just going to get absorbed in getting the graphite hotter because it takes a huge amount of energy to heat graphite up.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:09:40 And so a lot of the decay heat in a graphite reactor gets absorbed with just making the graphite hotter. By the way, graphite has a melting point – it actually doesn’t melt, it sublimates, but it has a sublimation point of around 3,000 degrees Celsius. So it can get extraordinarily hot.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:09:58 Uh, the other important aspect of this is that we use a fuel called TRISO. So TRISO, um, is a, uh, a particular fuel that can get extremely hot without compromising itself. So normal nuclear fuel can’t get that hot before it starts to crack and leak and, and eventually burst, and you have fission products leaking around inside the reactor.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:10:21 TRISO can get very, very hot, uh, before it gets, uh, compromised, over 2,000 degrees. Um, and so the combination of these things means in a shutdown scenario, the core can just get really hot and that’s actually just fine, that’s okay. And, um, a lot of the decay heat is taken care of by just allowing the core to heat up.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:10:46 And then the last thing is the size of the reactor. The reactor being very small means that we have a high surface area to volume ratio. Um, as a cylinder gets bigger, the, the walls of a cylinder, the surface of a cylinder scales with the square, whereas the volume of a cylinder scales with the cube. Right?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:11:04 So what that means is a really big cylinder has a small surface area and a huge volume, and a, a small cylinder has the opposite, right? So what this is behind us is a small cylinder. What that means is we actually have a lot of surface area.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:11:21 And ultimately, the, the heat from the decay products just escape through the walls of the vessel passively, right? They just get convected and radiated from the walls of the vessel.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:11:30 Um, and the combination of all of these three factors means if we were to have a circulator shut off of our reactor, exactly like Fukushima, um, what would happen is that the core would slowly heat up, heat would start escaping out the sides of the vessel, it would get to an equilibrium temperature which is below the temperatures at which nuclear fuel would be compromised or the graphite would be compromised, and then it would start to taper off.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:11:54 And what’s awesome about Valar is that that statement is not a theoretical statement. That is something that we’ve tested in real life. We had this exact reactor built exactly as it is in Los Angeles. We even built a fake building around the vessel to mimic this nuclear shielding to mimic the Citadel.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:12:00 And we insulated it with three times the amount of insulation that you would have in this concrete citadel, and we did exactly that. We actually ran the plant at full temperatures for about a week, and then, uh, we actually have a video of this, we turned off all safety systems. We just shut everything off, and we had temperature sensors inside the core and on the exterior of the vessel, and we said, let’s see if what we’ve designed for actually happens. And exactly what I said happened. The temperature rose, it reached an equilibrium point where the temperatures are very stable, where there’s heat being slowly, passively removed from the vessel walls, and then over about a two-day period, the heat, the temperature fell again.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:12:41 So really what all of this leads to is that when we talk about nuclear safety in the terms of the plants that Valor Atomics builds, it’s not engineering safety, it’s physics safety, right? The safety of our plant comes from physics. It comes from the basic choices that we’ve made in the physics and materials and geometry of our plants, not whether or not a single pump works or a single valve works or does it get flooded or any of these things.

Ti Morse: 1:13:06 So there’s this amazing chart that I absolutely love looking at, which is basically the launch cadence over time and you see effectively all of these different countries competing and the US kind of like tapers off in the early 2000s and we stopped launching and then suddenly you have SpaceX and they invert this entire graph and suddenly like 95% of all launches or something globally are just SpaceX launches and then there’s like Rocket Lab and China and I kind of think this is the same position that we are in right now, you know, 20 years ago is exactly what we’re in right now where there’s 30 reactors getting built in China, there’s like two getting built in the US, except for maybe there’s three now. How does the scale up look like for your reactors to get to a point where you’re actually matching or exceeding the SpaceX growth rate for launches?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:13:51 It’s so important that people understand that these things are possible in technology, right? And that’s probably one of the biggest contributions that Elon has made to mankind is that he’s given people a category for like absolutely fundamental change in the trajectory of an industry. Right? Like I think if you asked people in the early 2000s, if you showed people that graph beforehand, they’d be like, no, science fiction. Right? Like you’re, this is just not possible. And he gave people a category for no, no, this is possible. You can actually go from, you know, being the loser in an industry as a country to like stratospheric change. And that is exactly what we are trying to do here. And it flows into really every choice that Valor has made.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:14:43 You know, I like to say if you poke Valor in any place, you prick us in any place, we’ll bleed scale. We have meticulously, ruthlessly engineered everything we’re doing for maximum scale. And it actually goes back to the safety thing. Like you could argue that you don’t really need to make a plant this safe. One of the biggest criticisms that we get…

Isaiah Taylor: 1:15:00 …is for using TRISO. Um, because people are like, TRISO’s super expensive. And I’m like, well, one, we’re going to make it cheap, so that’s fine. But, you know, like we… it’s expensive because no one makes it, right? There’s like a couple companies that are starting to get back into it and they’ll scale and we’ll keep buying it and it’ll get cheap, right? So I don’t think that’s a big problem. But, um, a deeper and more fundamental point is like, if you’re serious about scaling nuclear to the inflectionary degree that we believe is possible, your plants really should be unbelievably safe. Like, it’s just going to be simpler and faster for us to scale with extreme safety because extreme safety means you can simplify operations, you can simplify manufacturing, you can broaden your supply chain, you can do all these things that are impossible if you have to accept a high level of hazard. So, we are serious as a company about building tens of thousands of reactors, eventually hundreds of thousands of reactors. If that’s the case, these things need to be really, really safe. So, you know, one of the things that I’ve noticed is people don’t do things that they believe are impossible. Right? Like belief is a prerequisite, even if it’s a bit of suspended disbelief, right? But like you have to have some degree or some manner of belief in order to do something. And I’m okay with suspended disbelief, you know, I think there’s plenty of people that we hired in the early days who I was like, you know, we’re going to go build a reactor and it’s going to turn on July 4th and they’re like…

Ti Morse: 1:16:31 Maybe? Like, we’ll see.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:16:34 And hey, you know, we’re a month and a half out. We still got a lot to get right before that thing turns on. But I think over time it’s acceptable to suspend disbelief for a while and then you watch it happen. But in that suspension of disbelief and in these beliefs of being able to build tens of thousands, you have to make real tradeoffs for that outcome, right? And a good example of that is TRISO, another good example of that is using a low power density format reactor, right? An HTGR is not a high power density reactor. Um, but it’s so simple that we can build thousands of them. And I believe that building thousands is essentially the only thing that will matter, right? Um, that and pace, right? Doing it fast and doing it many times is in the long term, and by long term I mean five to ten years, the only thing that will matter. Um, and in order to do that, you have to have simplicity and you have to have safety, which leads you to a high-temperature gas reactor, it leads you to pure graphite, TRISO fuel, helium coolant, um, and the approximate size that we’re talking about here. So yes, scale I think is a thing that humans in general don’t have a good intuition for. Like it’s just hard for us to imagine something going from zero to one to a thousand to ten thousand to a hundred thousand to a million. And, um, I just think of…

Isaiah Taylor: 1:18:00 About the million a lot. Like it’s just something that like keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning. I want to get to the millionth reactor very badly.

Ti Morse: 1:18:07 If you had to like self-analyze and think about the way that you think versus how other people think, what is the biggest difference between those things?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:18:14 I have a very high tolerance for looking dumb. That’s one of my secret weapons is like, I am perfectly fine looking like an idiot. And I’ve done it a lot, I’ve had a good amount of practice looking like an idiot. Some of those times were because I was, and a lot of those times were because, you know, I was right and it took a while for people to realize it. It’s maybe 50-50, but but no, like a huge, huge part of my advantage is like, I am perfectly okay being the idiot in any room. And that room could be, you know, a group of policy people, it could be a group of engineers, it could be on a construction site, it could be in the room with the President of the United States, and I am perfectly happy looking like an idiot because in the long term, my ability to uncover what is actually true is directly correlated with my ability to make the right decisions and move fast. And I have had to like come to terms with specific moments like that over the last, honestly seven years of building different companies, but it’s painful, like people don’t like it. People really, really hate looking dumb. And I kind of embraced it, I kind of like it. You know, I’ve had some hit pieces about me and I like to laugh about them and I tweet about them and I like to, you know, print them out and stuff because the more that you can get used to that and like flex the muscle, it’s like a superpower, it’s like a crazy unlock that like gives you access to the root truth of the world because no one else is willing to look dumb enough to go find out.

Ti Morse: 1:19:55 On the like hit pieces point, did you learn anything from Palmer?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:19:58 I have always appreciated Palmer for not letting, like not letting it slide, right? Like he is, you know, he’s actually a very warlike person. He’s a very nice person, but he’s like always at war with like somebody. But like that’s the nature of reality is like every CEO’s at war, they’re just like a lot of CEOs are like kind of in denial that they’re at war, they want to try to like think about something else or they want to go to the beach or whatever. And yeah, like that’s something that I very much appreciate about Palmer. And you know, actually shout out to him for in the early days of the company was one of the first like well-known people to like vocally defend us and come to our defense when we were in the early days with this crazy vision that we wanted to go fast and you know, spent a lot of time actually defending me on Twitter in the early days where people were saying this guy’s a high school dropout, like what is he doing? You can’t do this without a nuclear PhD. So yeah, I will always be very appreciative of that.

Ti Morse: 1:20:57 There’s this idea of doing things like just attacking the critical path and that’s like the… thing that is in bold red letters on the screen, but then you also have to be doing things in parallel at the same time to make sure that basically like all these different things come together to achieve the critical path at some point down the line. So how do you kind of think about parallel pathing and structuring that the best?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:21:17 Things have like a certain amount of inevitable time. Like there’re certain things that even if you have the most talented people in the world in front of you and all of the tools and all of the stuff just takes a certain amount of time. Like a good example of that is like heat treat. Right, heat treat just takes time. And there’s nothing you could do about it, right? Because if you go hotter, then you’re going to melt the metal and you’re going to get a different phase than you want. Um, and if you, you know, it’s if you think it the heat will penetrate faster, um, you know, you’re actually just going to like mess with the phase on the surface. So like there’s a certain amount of soak time for a metal part that is inescapable. Until, you know, now that I say that out loud I guess maybe there’s like ways that you could use like electromagnetism or something like that to heat it up. Actually someone should think about that. Could you just like microwave parts to heat treat? Anyway, this is a distraction. Um, maybe someone’s already doing that. I’ll bet someone’s already doing that. Uh, the point is there are like irreducible time, you know, there’re irreducible time frames to to some things and, um, I think one big mistake that companies make is like you have to stay focused, but also you have to start the clock on some really important things and a super good example of that is where we are right now. Um, one of the really unique things about Valar is that we are not going uh, we’re not turning this reactor on we’re under the pilot program but we’re not turning it on in a national lab. Uh, this is not a national lab where we are here and I love the national labs and they have done insane work in the history there. I mean, uh, actually my my grandmother was born in a national lab. Literally. Um, my grandmother was born in Oak Ridge. So I I like I have a deep affection for them. But if we were to go try to turn this plant on uh, in a national lab that would be a crutch, right? And I know that as a company that needs to scale and wants to make thousands of these, we have to go and learn how to take a patch of dirt and turn it into a nuclear site. And if we did that in a lab, we wouldn’t learn that, right? And there is just there’s irreducible clock time, right? I think one of the big things that people need to understand is just two different types of time. There’s like normal time and there’s clock time, right? And clock time stops for no man, right? Clock time keeps ticking no matter if you’re Elon Musk or you’re, you know, a dude on the street, right? Clock time just keeps ticking. So clock time is the most valuable and most difficult asset. There’s other types of time, right? Like an engineer hour is like a fungible type of time where you just hire 10 more engineers and now you have 10 times the time, right? But clock time is not like that. And um, you know, we have to start the clock ticking on really, really important things as soon as you can. Now, you can go overboard with this and start some clocks that you weren’t ready for yet and distract yourselves and lose focus and fail. That’s very possible.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:24:00 So there’s an art to that, um, and I think Valar has stepped out and, you know, honestly we’re ticking on a lot of clocks that people thought were impossible. Um, we are, you know, halfway through a lot of clocks that we literally were told was not physically possible and by experts, by industry experts, by names that you would know, um, that, you know, later this year they’re gonna see those, those clocks resolve in our favor. So, um, yeah, you have to be, you have to be cognizant that like more money doesn’t solve the problem. In a, in a problem of an irreducible clock time problem, you can’t throw money at it. Um, this is one big mistake that the nuclear industry’s been making for, you know, a decade and a half, and one thing that, that was very surprising to me is that when we started the company, we’d only raised a few million dollars, one of the most common complaints that I got was like, ‘yeah, you haven’t raised enough money, you’re not going to be able to win.’ And I’m like, ‘well listen, like, I know people with billions of dollars in this industry who aren’t doing anything, so money is actually not really the, the primary thing in this, in this game. Like, there’s something else, there are other factors than just how much cash you have in the bank.’ And it turns out that that was true. So, yeah, clock time and the irreducibility of certain problems forces you into parallelism and it forces you to take, again, capital risk and time risk and people risk and all these things, but um, fundamentally that’s what’s going to allow you to, to win.

Ti Morse: 1:25:29 When I think of the things that scare me the most, it’s always the things that I just can’t predict will be problems and then they end up being problems, they’re effectively like unknown bottlenecks, um, unpredictability. How are you trying to think forward, I don’t know, a year, two years, maybe more, to figure out where the future bottlenecks and unknowns, so that you never run into a problem where there’s literally some paperwork that you have to fill out and it’s like the deadline’s next week and you just didn’t even realize that it was a problem until now?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:25:56 Yeah. So the most fundamental answer here is that we keep the overall pace of the organization very high, right? Because if you have an, an organization pace that’s extremely high, you will be able to figure out a lot of different ways to succeed, right? And in some things that look like, you know, irreducible bottlenecks, you could figure out a way around, you could engineer a way around, etc. But the other thing is, is what I said before, which is to think about the end state. Like, what has to be true for us to have a million reactors? Like, I think about that concretely all the time. Like, those decisions made in this plant in this room that look weird until you think about like, well yeah, we’re trying to do that a million times. Like, and in this obviously this plant is not ready for that, this one’s not ready to be made a million times, but we learn some lessons on this that will contribute to doing this a million times. Um, and so, yeah, you, you have to think backwards from like what needs to be true for this, for this to take place. And then the other thing is like, you have to have a certain amount of paranoia. Like, I have a hard time going to sleep at night.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:27:00 Thought about all the different possible bottlenecks that it might present and like, that’s the downside to being a founder, like you just, you’re going to have to do that.

Ti Morse: 1:27:07 When we were walking through, you said, you know, for this one we are going to have all the wires underneath the floor, but for future ones we want it to just be modular and so you can just plop this crate down and suddenly it all fits together and works.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:27:22 Yep.

Ti Morse: 1:27:23 What all, like, learnings have you, have you gotten from this initial facility?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:27:29 Yeah. I mean, we’ve had thousands of things that we’ve learned here. I mean, honestly, really simple things about like, how do we serialize concrete versus MEP versus plant production, right? Like, how do you do these things in the right order and do them extremely fast? Like, we built this really fast, right? This was a bare patch of dirt in September, but we now know how to do it a lot faster. And when we go and do that, we’re going to do it again. There are not too many things that I can say specifically here yet, because they are really, really valuable, honestly. Like these, these lessons, these like painful lessons we’ve learned, like, are our moat and they are the value of the company.

Ti Morse: 1:28:10 Let’s say everything works and you’re ready to scale to a gigasite and you’re putting like a thousand of these things on a little plot of land. How do you actually do that? What does that look like?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:28:19 Yeah, I actually don’t think it works that way, by the way, like what you’re saying, where like, oh, now I’m ready to scale.

Ti Morse: 1:28:25 Okay.

Isaiah Taylor: 1:28:26 Like, it’s so more, it’s so much more organic than that and it’s so much more driven by the regular pace of the organization. Like, I don’t think you’ll be able to say at a certain point like, oh, now you’re scaling. Like we’re scaling right now, right? Like we built a reactor, we’re about to turn it on, it’s going to make power. We’re going to do it again, we’re going to do it again, we’re going to do it again. And the tick rate of the organization will get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And soon the tick, you know, at some point the tick rate will be an hour and then it’ll be a minute, right? And we’ll be building millions of reactors. So, you know, I feel like I’ve spent a long time talking about other people’s mistakes and, you know, that’s only because the mistakes I’ve made are very precious to me and I don’t want to reveal these secrets. But, you know, this is something that I think the nuclear industry does too much is they’re like, oh, we’re going to do all this engineering and design and then we’ll scale. It’s like, no, if you aren’t already in the process of building a reactor and then another one and then another one, you have not started the work of scaling yet. Like scaling is a thing you do, it’s a thing that your organization does. It’s not a thing that you can design to and then start doing one day. It’s a thing you’re doing or you’re not, it’s a thing that’s in your DNA or not. And, I would say that Valar has been just built from the first day of the company to do that.

Ti Morse: 1:29:45 Let’s end it on what does July 4th of this year signify?

Isaiah Taylor: 1:29:49 I think that July 4th will be a rebirth for the nuclear industry in the United States. It’s not just symbolic, obviously it’s the 250th anniversary of the… States. It’s the deadline for the July 4th reactor program, the nuclear pilot program created by EO 14301. But there’s something so important about plants getting built in the physical world. It’s so much harder and it’s so much more impactful. Right? Like, I want to be clear, people have designed much better reactors than this. Right? There have been many, many smart teams over the last 20 years in startups and other companies who have designed much better reactors than this. But this plant will have a bigger impact because it’s real and it exists. And this is the fundamental cultural divide between us and everyone else is that we value a small reactor making 100 kilowatts of power infinitely more than the best possible design. Infinitely more. One reactor splitting atoms, making a small amount of power, making gamma rays that we actually had to deal with the reality of, is infinitely more meaningful to us. So I think the meaning of what’s going to happen in July 4th is we’re going to be, the United States is going to be back in the business of doing that. Right? Not just my company, you know, others who are working on zero-power criticalities which are also important, like the one we did back in November. These are important steps. We’re going to be back in the business of splitting atoms again. And actually doing that in real life is the bottleneck on doing it a million times and to producing the amount of power that we’re going to need to do all of the things that we care about as a country and to make energy as cheap as we possibly can.