#23 - Isaiah Taylor, Founder & CEO of Valar Atomics

0:28We have a pretty stark choice in front of us. nine months. Yeah, the first one was built in eight months. The second one was about four months, and then the X10 was another nine months. So really, really rapid succession, yes. What do you think has, or like what has shifted in the past, I don't know, 60 or 70 years that made it so it takes like 15 years now, up from nine months? Yeah, we got worse at two things. Obviously, we got worse at licensing commercial nuclear reactors. That's pretty obvious, right? From 1979 to today, the NRC has granted, four licenses for new reactors. So there's this clear stop in commercial nuclear reactors.

1:05But I think even more important is that we stopped innovating. We stopped turning on test reactors. There were dozens of nuclear reactor experiments at Oak Ridge and Idaho and a bunch of different places within the AEC. And we split the AEC out into two different agencies, sort of a nuclear test agency that was the DOE and then the NRC for commercial. And unfortunately, neither of them have been able to do their job. So we're kind of standing here at a hopefully a new moment, right? Some executive orders came out recently, and hopefully we're about to see that change. But you really have to have innovation.

1:37Innovation is the lifeblood of any industry. If you're not testing new things, you're not building new things, that industry is going to die over time, and your competitors will outpace you. Yeah. Do you want to talk about a little bit what just happened as far as the Trump stamp? Yeah, it's wildly exciting. I think that we are We're looking at a new era of nuclear energy and specifically of American nuclear energy. This is all about dominance. Right. I think we're shifting from a frame of, you know, trying to protect the U.S. monopoly to actually building again. Right. These regulations and a lot of these rules came from a time when the United States had a perfect monopoly on nuclear.

2:14We were the only country in the world that knew how to do it. That was the case in 1946. The British knew it a little bit, but, you know, that was fine. And it was really just how do we protect what the United States has? And unfortunately, we really slowed ourselves down more than we slowed anybody else down, right? We didn't stop all of our rivals from getting not only commercial nuclear, but even the nuclear bomb. And at the same time, we eroded our ability to innovate and to build. So this is a reset. It's about we want American companies to be the best nuclear builders in the world. We have a pretty stark choice in front of us.

2:44We have two stark choices. Do we want to be a country that can build energy, right? That's a choice. And that's an important choice for a bunch of reasons. but artificial intelligence obviously accelerates the importance of that. The other is who's going to build the rest of the nuclear reactors around the world. And I believe that there are three options today for that. You can have Russia build your nuclear reactors around the world. You can have China build your nuclear reactors or Valor Atomics. And we're hoping that, you know, after these executive orders, it makes it a lot easier for us to be that company.

3:11Yeah, I was watching one of Jason Carman's like frontier films, And I loved this line that you said, where you basically said one of our core values at Valor Atomics is to build nuclear reactors, you have to actually build nuclear reactors. That's absolutely right. Why is that? Like, how did you come to that philosophy? And why is that so foreign? Yeah. In order to build nuclear, you have to build nuclear. It actually is pretty simple. And every other industry seems to understand this, right? Or at least comes to learn this over time. So the space industry is a great example of this. In order to launch rockets, you have to launch rockets.

3:42You know, SpaceX figured that out. They launched the Falcon 1. People kind of laughed at them, right? It's like, what are these dudes doing in a garage building a rocket? But that quickly evolved, right? And it became the Falcon 9. And people took it a little more seriously. But still, it's just kind of a smaller rocket. It's not as big as a space launch system or anything that we're ideating in NASA at the time. And then it lands itself, right? Well, why did it land itself? Because they launched it enough that they could gather data and they could iterate. And now it lands itself. That's pretty serious.

4:08Now you get into Starship. And Starship is going to break the price curve all over again. So you do well. what you do often, right? So when you're starting, you have to actually do the minimum possible thing as fast as you can, right? So that's our philosophy here. What's sitting behind me here, this is Ward Zero. This is our first reactor prototype. This is called a non-nuclear reactor. So essentially, we built a nuclear reactor in 12 months, but we didn't put uranium in it, right? The paperwork to do, you know, that we'd have to do in order to put uranium, this would take, you know, two to three, yeah, two to three times longer than building it, right?

4:40So what you do is you build as much of it as you can. We got incredibly close here to a real nuclear reactor. If you put uranium in this thing, it would actually work. You could split atoms in this device standing behind me. Now, we don't put uranium in it, but we do as much as we can. So we put silicon carbide inside of there and we mimic a nuclear reaction, right? So we pull about 12 city blocks worth of power off the Los Angeles grid, run it through that core, and we can get actually above nuclear temperatures inside the core. So this is... How hot is that? So we can get the core temp momentarily as close, you know, close to 2000 degrees Celsius, right?

5:13So incredibly hot inside the core. We'll do high temperature operations around 1 ,000, inch it up over time. The idea here is you want to envelope the system. You want to figure out how hot can you get this, what breaks first, what leaks first, how do your materials behave under different heat and pressure, and you really want to get to know the system. You want to know what breaks. So this is the only way to get experience in technology. So what I mean when I say you have to build nuclear to build nuclear is you don't learn that much on paper. You can spend years and years in analysis, years in planning, years in engineering, and you actually haven't gotten that much closer to the goal.

5:51Because when you actually go to build it, you'll figure out that bolt broke, this thing sheared, that seal leaks, this supplier actually can't supply the thing that they said they could. You have to go figure out all those problems in real time and real hardware. We've already learned so much in the last three months just building this thing and operating it. And, you know, that information is ours now. Like we were fundamentally ahead because we decided to build quickly. Yeah. So when I interviewed you last year, you were literally in Augustus's like one room upstairs and we just like use part of his garage as the place.

6:22And there was like a little logo behind you with, you know, made out of sheet metal. And today there's like actually a thermal prototype. Yes. It's like sitting behind you that you built on like a seed round. It's very, very exciting. Yes. It's crazy. What's it been like for that transition from going from just sitting in a warehouse, not having some ideas on paper to actually having it. Yeah. I mean, it's been an insane year. I have never seen a team work as hard as this team has worked. I mean, genuinely, I have pictures of people sleeping on the floor, like right out there on the floor. You might see in a couple of the rooms, we have these sort of net chairs, like beach chairs.

6:58And during about three-week period of assembly, they were set up on the floor and people would just fall asleep in front of the reactor and wake up a couple hours later and keep going. It takes unbelievable dedication. We've genuinely done something historic here, building this in one year. We believe this is the most sophisticated thermal prototype ever developed, meaning as close as you can get to fission in a one-to-one scale as has ever been done before. And we did it in record time. So we are hardcore dedicated to actually building the hardware, getting experience with it, determining the issues, fixing the issues, and moving on to the next model at a very rapid pace.

7:34And it is similar to the pace that we were doing in the original days of nuclear. And I would argue that those first days of nuclear where we were building prototypes rapidly in a year or less was the only time that there was nuclear innovation. Since then, we haven't really been innovating on nuclear. We've been maybe maturing in plant design a little bit, changing things here and there. But all of the initial designs that we now have were piloted in a really short amount of time in the national labs going very, very fast. So we're going back to go forward, going back in time to an older way of building, which is super fast, super iterative and real hardware.

8:08You know, we pay attention to the nuts and bolts and we keep moving. Yeah. How did you come to like, I think you basically created a relationship with like the government of the Philippines to figure out how to build a reactor faster. That's right. Right. How did that come together? Why'd you do it? Yeah, you know, we're super excited about this partnership that we have with the Philippines. We reviewed over 80 countries all over the world to figure out who has the best regulatory environment to move very quickly. You know, who really needs energy in the short term? Where can we solve a really big problem for somebody?

8:40And the Philippines has been an incredible partner. So, yeah, we have a public-private partnership with them. And the flavor of that partnership is very collaborative, right? It's like, let's turn on a nuclear reactor together. Let's do it as fast as we can. They get experience, we get experience, and we're going to split atoms, you know, in real life. It's going to be really exciting. Yeah. So I know that like you posted a while back on Twitter about basically this video of a few guys just like dancing on a hill. And no one, you know, everyone thinks that they're crazy. They all look crazy. Yeah.

9:11And then over time, basically a few more people join in and a few more people join in and soon like everyone's dancing. Yes. And you basically said, you know, this is what like the best early stage, you know, founders look like. They just look like the crazy people at the beginning. Yep. But what was that like for you being that crazy person? Look, I think I'm still that crazy person, right? I think where Valor is today is that, you know, I've been dancing on the hill for, you know, for a year. And I have those early people kind of around me now. So we've got like, you know, in that video, you have the one guy and another guy joins in.

9:40That's Mark. And then we have a couple other guys and Kip. And, you know, we have like maybe five people around. The team today is 35. It's fantastic. But proportionally, right, we're still a couple of crazy people on the hill. and over the next couple years, you know, it's going to be very exciting. This is going to become a very, very large company that's going to power the world and, you know, we're really excited about that. Yeah. Have you, like, had any major, I don't know, personal changes since starting the company? I think so. I mean, I hope so, right? Like, I hope that I'm getting better and better at this but at the same time, you know, I'm probably going to keep the chip on the shoulder that I have for a long time, and that definitely propels me.

10:19So I think I've gotten hopefully a little bit better at communicating and inspiring and showing people that this company is going to be enormous. And that really is our ambition. We want to power the world. But I think we've stayed very, very true to the original principle, which is we want to split atoms in record time, and then we want to move on to the next model very quickly and the next one. And that's going to lead to massive, massive scale. We want to make tens of thousands of nuclear reactors. I've had to learn a lot of things very quickly, but I have the benefit of an incredible team around me with way more experience than I have.

10:54And that's how you move fast. Yeah. Do you know why or is there like a clear reason why there's like super valuable startup companies that are like publicly traded that have never turned on a nuclear reactor in their entire existence? And they've existed for like 10 plus years. Yeah, you know, I think that there's a bit of a mistake going on in nuclear in general, which is it's a little bit of like software mindset. So let me contrast for you, like how software companies work and how deep hard tech companies work. Right. Generally, software companies are limited on your understanding of product market fit.

11:27Right. You're really, really trying to understand what's the exact product that perfectly connects all the customers needs and then is scalable and replicable, you know, to millions and millions of people over the world. And so your early customer signals are incredibly valuable, right? MOUs with customers, revenue from customers, these early integrations with the customer are a massive signal that you've got something, right? I think deep tech is a little bit different than this, right? So in deep tech, the customer actually maybe doesn't know what they want. And in fact, I'll go further. The customer definitely doesn't know what they want, right?

12:01So think about like SpaceX, right? If NASA was giving Elon feedback on the rocket that they wanted, right? So they want to get people to the International Space Station, right? And they want to be able to put - Like telling him what to build. Right, and they want to put kilograms in orbit, these sorts of things. And Elon sort of like listened to NASA. We would not have the Falcon 9, right? The device that you build would look nothing like the Falcon 9. And it took Elon saying like, I think NASA's wrong, actually. this thing should launch it you know it should land itself uh which was like laughed at right and and so you there's a certain extent in hard tech where you're on the edge of the future and you understand what the customer wants but you're you're a layer removed from it and i think that's intentional so what does spacex do they they build these rockets and they have a ton of conviction about how those rockets are shaped and how they're built and then they separate that from the customer and they sell kilograms to orbit right and then they focus deeply on the cadence and on the operations and the supply chain and manufacturing and like they make that rocket work perfectly and then they just sell kilograms to orbit to the market and i think that deep tech is shaped this way oftentimes and we have the same conviction so i think the mistake that people are making in the market is they go out and they form customer relationships and they you know get utilities to say yeah we would take a couple nuclear reactors at that price point and and i look at that and i say the demand is actually infinite right you can assume infinite demand um on day zero.

13:23If you can build a nuclear reactor that is the right price and that is very safe and that has reasonable timelines attached to it, of course, you're going to be able to sell those. Right. And so we focus all of our effort, all of our time on actually getting to that point. We want to get to the point where we are able to build, you know, a hundred nuclear reactors on a site, making gigawatts of power, you know, as soon as possible. And the critical path through that is not, you know, marketing and it's not, you know, customer relationships and it's not, you know, all of these different areas that people like to focus on, it's actually technological competence.

13:57It's building, it's supply chain, it's manufacturing, it's data, it's testing. That is the critical path. That's what we focus all of our energy on. And unfortunately, I think the market doesn't quite understand that yet. Again, the market doesn't quite understand that the problem, how is this market shaped? It's a capability constrained market, not a demand constrained market. There's not a product market fit problem here. If you can switch the polarity of an electrical field 60 times per second, and you can make 25 megawatts, and that device is a low enough price point, everyone wants to buy that machine, clearly.

14:35And so that's entirely what we focus on. Yeah. So in that same vein, you want to build these massive gigasites with hundreds of reactors on them in one place. And America used to build or be behind mega projects. And it feels like that's hugely fallen off recently. It's gotten to the point where, as recently as a few years ago, SpaceX was getting fined for pouring potable drinking water on its launch pads in the pursuit of lowering the mass to orbit cost. How do you think we changed that? So there's a couple of surface areas of contact here that we need to think about. On the mega projects themselves, I would say that Valor is much more focused on lots of manufacturing than on big construction, right?

15:23So a lot of these issues are eliminated by making the things smaller and making a lot of them. We're really bad at like large construction projects now, unfortunately. This is a labor cost problem. It's a labor tooling problem. It's, you know, it is an environmental problem as well. Construction just has a lot of, you know, interface with regulation and with, you know, especially environmental regulation. So But manufacturing more, constructing less helps to avoid a lot of these problems in tooling and labor and environmental. The other one is this class of environmental regulation called NEPA.

15:54So NEPA has traditionally been a huge headache for nuclear. Basically, every other industry has figured out a way to navigate through NEPA and still be able to build things. Nuclear is just like this, you know, unfortunate area where we've decided that we need a full environmental impact statement before we do anything. Right. And it's like that's not what Congress intended at all. It's what's sort of grown up through the bureaucracy. So I think that, you know, in the executive orders that came out recently, you know, where the government is told to reconsider that constraint and, you know, see if we can make that a lot easier and a lot faster.

16:27So I'm bullish. You know, I think that we will see a very different environment the next couple of years. The other thing, though, is Valor is an international company. We build nuclear reactors all over the world. We want to build nuclear in all of the U.S. allied countries. And there are different jurisdictional constraints all over the world. So we look for places, especially in the next couple of years, where it's very fast to build, very easy to build, and where we can solve a huge problem very quickly. And then we work our way back to the United States as it becomes possible. Yeah. So I know when we talked initially, you didn't have a concrete, we are going to build a one gigawatt reactor, like a five or ten or whatever.

17:05How did you narrow down what the most logical path or logical thing to tackle would be? Absolutely. So we started small. We said, let's be very cautious about predicting the future before we have experience in hardware. So we hadn't built any hardware yet. So we said, let's not take a guess about what this commercial unit is going to look like yet. Let's instead build whatever we can, test it out, get to know the supply chains, get to know the metal, right? See what breaks, you know, understand vendors, these sorts of things. And that has informed kind of our next step. So we do think we have a picture now of what that commercial unit looks like after having built this and tested it out.

17:41We think that's about a 25 megawatt electric unit. You know, I think that's the right bite size. You know, if you want a gigawatt, you build 40 of them. And that's great because it's really easy to stamp these out. You know, just make a lot of them, plug them in, you make a gigawatt. So we expect the commercial unit size to sort of think of this as like our Falcon 9, right? The Falcon 9 for us is Ward 3. It's a 25 megawatt electric reactor. Visually, it's about 1.7 times larger than this. So imagine this 1.7 times scale up. That's a 25 megawatt unit. That's what we'll run with. Yeah. What was the experience like?

18:11So you're initially at the Rainmaker place and then suddenly you like move out of there and go into another location only to realize like it's too small. You have to move again. what was that like yeah yes we this is our third location technically if you start with my office where i founded the company this is our fourth location in about 14 months um and uh yeah you know all of this like we do everything fast right we we move quickly and we iterate and we adapt right so we we hoped we were going to be able to build this reactor in our old location ceilings weren't tall enough and we thought it's fine you know we asked the landlord can we poke a hole in the ceiling and we'll like build like a gantry around whatever what's that conversation like It was funny.

18:49You know, Mark is an awesome guy. He's a really flexible dude. So, uh, but we realized, you know, we need to fit a crane up there and take the head off and all these, all these things. But, you know, we just worked with what we could at the time. You know, we, we couldn't, you know, we're moving so fast. We couldn't even, you know, we couldn't have signed a lease on this property, you know, until we had gotten the seed round done. So you do what you can with the resources you can, and you always move fast. That's the biggest thing. You know, when we finally decided this location, this is just like who Valor is culturally.

19:17When we decided on this location, It was after four months of negotiation for another facility in El Segundo that, again, had the right parameters in terms of ceiling height. But the landlord just really could not get there on terms and like figuring out how to fix the, you know, had a lot of work to do. So I just decided in an afternoon, like, all right, we got to be done with this. It's time to move. We got to go. The goal is to build nuclear reactors, not negotiate. Exactly. So the goal is built. Exactly. That's right. And so I called up the real estate agent on this place and I said, I want to be in there in three weeks.

19:52We hadn't talked to anybody yet, but I knew that this property was there. I toured it while I was under construction. I said, that's the one. We're done. We're going. And so I called him and I said, who's the fastest real estate lawyer that you know I want to lease signed by Monday? And was this like on a Friday or something? This was on a Thursday. Yeah. So you had three days. And so I called him and he said, well, this guy's pretty fast. So I called that guy and I was like, hey, what's the fastest that you can turn around a red line on the lease? It's a, you know, 30 ,000 square foot facility, pretty big facility.

20:19He said, ah, you know, it's going to take a day or two. And I hung up. And then I called the guy back and I was like, he wasn't fast enough. Give me somebody else. And so he gave me another guy and I called him. I was like, what's the fastest you can turn around a red line? He's like, I can get it to you tonight. I was like, sweet, you're hired. So we turned around the red line, handed it back. and in the meantime, you know, my team had already been sort of prepped that, you know, look, this is an incredibly tight timeline. We built this thing in 12 months. That is extraordinary in every frame from design to engineering, to GD &T, to procurement, to manufacturing, to assembly, to commissioning, right?

20:55That's an unbelievably short timeline. So we move fast in every single step. And part of that is I instinctively knew we're going to need a machine shop. Now on paper, you don't need a machine shop, right? Because we've procured all these parts from vendors and we're essentially just doing engineering and we get the parts shipped here. We put them together, right? That's fine. Well, no, it's not fine because vendors fall down, right? Vendors screw up. They miss timelines. They go slower. And so I told the team, look at the bomb, look at the bill of materials. And I want to be able to make 80 % of this bill of materials in a shop that we own and we have commissioned and it's running.

21:29And I need that in four weeks, right and uh david my head of manufacturing here was like well normally takes about three months to set up a machine shop i'm like yeah i know but we're gonna have it here we're gonna hit this up and he said sir yes sir and he did it um and he started that procurement process before we were even in this building and we told him yeah ship to that location um yeah we'll we'll have access to it by the time the trucks get here um and and we did it you know it was it was sitting here running um before thanksgiving which was extremely important because we were able to fix you know all the parts that came in that the suppliers got wrong and, uh, you know, other suppliers dropped the ball and we had metal stock on hand and we were able to hit the timeline that we intended to hit, you know, to the day actually.

22:07Um, but we would not have been able to do that without all those pieces coming together. So look, we, we move fast, we move aggressively. Uh, we don't take no for an answer. Yeah. Uh, that leads perfectly into the next thing, which is basically like how the hell do you hire such like high agency cracked people that are just going to get shit done timelines that shouldn't be possible. I can't leak too much alpha here. Um, I would not like too much alpha here, but I take hiring more seriously than anything else. Genuinely, the people who are here are filtered through not just technical capability.

22:40That's ground stakes, right? You have to be technically capable, but you have to be driven. You have to be willing to put everything on the line. Everyone who joins here knows that this reactor may turn on in the Philippines, may turn on somewhere else, may turn on anywhere in the world. And we're going to go wherever in the world it's possible to turn on a nuclear reactor in record time. and yeah they're excited for that mission everybody's you know who's here you know is ready for this company to make the world's make the world's energy you know I will say the one one bit of alpha I'll put out there is like we index on anger we like to find angry people yeah why angry we like to find angry people because nuclear is this really you know incredible technology that's been sitting on the shelf for 40 years right and if you are in that industry gaining experience, gaining wisdom, getting your head into it, and you're not angry that nothing's happening.

23:32Like you know what's possible. You know it's possible and no one's doing it and nothing's happening and nothing's getting built and no atoms are being split. If that doesn't make you angry, then you've sort of figured out a way to just coexist with that status quo. And we want people who have not figured out how to exist in that status quo. And sometimes that means we find people who started there, got fed up, went into other industries built a ton of cool shit and then came back right or they've been nuclear but they've just been angry the whole time and like they get here and they're like it's time to actually build like we're going to do this they need to like do some anyway hallucinogens or something no no they need to work on this yes exactly yeah um so when you were first starting out you basically went through like 80 plus rejections i believe and you know the whole like come back to me when you have a lead is a rejection it's a no right they're not giving you a check it's a no it's a no um And you basically pushed through that and eventually you got like one venture fund, Riot, who just like put in the entire thing and then everyone's all like mad that you didn't come back to them when you had to leave.