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

25:57Isaiah Taylor:You have a pressure tank, and you have a moderator inside of the tank, and you have uranium inside of the moderator. 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. I find that even people in nuclear don't actually 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, it will match the amount of power because reactors have a what's called a thermal feedback of reactivity.

26:36Isaiah Taylor:So if you flow more fluid through the core, it will drop the temperature and the reactivity will go up. And so really 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 you get it right. A lot of the things you can actually just address in the design space. But from a mechanical perspective, this is, 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 these sorts of things.

27:14Isaiah Taylor: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 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 biggest challenges that we face every single day is like I love the nuclear industry. I've been watching heroes move in the nuclear industry for decades and a lot of those heroes really dislike me like really genuinely genuinely dislike me this almost sounds like the elon thing where he talked with like i think some astronauts or something and they were like private you know commercial space shouldn't exist yep yep one of my heroes as well actually uh a couple of my heroes uh in the apollo missions uh really really disliked elon as well though i think they made up eventually which is great um yeah so i mean that's the nature of any very like disruptive uh mover and technologies that the the existing people there are not going to get what you're doing and i would just appeal to the past right 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 one chicago pile two x10 all the work at oak ridge where my great-grandfather was these things um 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 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 part of the category of humans build difficult things and we deal with kinetic systems and we overcome hard challenges.

29:29Isaiah Taylor: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 get to deploy that in the field. 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.

30:10Isaiah Taylor: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 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.

30:44Isaiah Taylor: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. 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. A hundred percent. Yeah. 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.

31:17Isaiah Taylor: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 is 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.

31:49Isaiah Taylor: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 and on command. And so this is like super important stuff to get right? And 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.

32:24Isaiah Taylor: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 is supposed to turn on. There's got to be some integration and tests. And so we ended up making the control drive units ourselves. And we expected it to be very hard. And it was very hard. We went through, I mean, probably 40 major iterations of those control 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.

32:56Isaiah Taylor:And I mean, that thing is just running up and down day and night. And we're discovering failure modes and we're discovering wear patterns and we're improving the design and we're you know fixing the electronic system and the motor controllers and all this stuff that you never think about um 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.

33:34Isaiah Taylor: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. We get to know people, we get to know the city council, you know, half this, 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.

34:04Isaiah Taylor:We say, what do you guys think about 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 uh 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 we just make reactors um you know we would have 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 and anything that falls under that scope anything that blocks you know that pathway is our responsibility to fix yesterday you were talking about this idea of most reactor companies are basically trying to design this beautiful thing that looks like a ferrari yeah and you're trying to design the toyota camry yes the toyota just makes like a million of them a year Yep.

35:17Why is that so important?

35:18Isaiah Taylor: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 that we're going to make energy 10 times cheaper. And nuclear fission is the way to do that based on the physics. But if you look at the cost of nuclear, most of the cost is the plant itself. Right. Uranium is 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.

35:52Isaiah Taylor:One is you design this perfect machine, which makes so much power that no matter how hard it was and how complicated it was and no matter how long it takes, it was going to be worth it because it's going to make 1.2 gigawatts, right? 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? Factories are buildings where things go to become free, right? And so nuclear reactors need to go to factories to become free. In a factory setting, you have the opportunity to continuously ask the question, why are we doing that?

36:33Isaiah Taylor:Why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? In a factory setting, you have the same group of smart people on the floor watching something happen. And that 22-year-old kid 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 is like ah well because i actually i don't know why do we do that and then you chase that that thread down 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 this learning so the goal is to to make nuclear reactors something that are repeatably built and you could start to bring these costs down you can 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 i really believe that's the answer you You can trade off efficiency.

37:42Isaiah Taylor: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 1 ,000 and then even below that. 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 problem.

38:17For 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? Yeah.

38:26Isaiah Taylor:This is something I've actually thought about for a long time. I guess I read that on social media like eight or nine years ago when that was sort of going around as a Bezos system 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 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 we are at the place that we are at as a company because we have sprinted through some one-way doors.

38:57Isaiah Taylor:And, you know, there's a bit of like instinct here and just, you know, make it work. That's happened. And I think a lot of it is you have to think all the way back to the fundamentals. I think that people don't really read laws that much. Like they don't really read laws and regulations, but you can read this stuff, right? Like it's out there. And actually now there's like Claude. So you can even go faster with, you know, opening eye and Claude and Chachipitin, these things. But even before that, you know, the laws were out there and the rights 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 valor has is we don't flinch when it comes to risking large amounts of capital on things that really matter 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 but as someone that also risks a huge amount of capital yeah listen man like you have to you have to swing big 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 10 times cheaper it's hard to imagine a more important problem that when you're working on a problem like that you're going to have to take some big swings and some of those swings are going to be zero or one swings where you know if you spent 40 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 so that is uh it's a it's a high stakes game but you have to play it right and um and especially if you want to build the most important things in the world.

40:58Isaiah Taylor: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 of one-way doors, you know, I'm going to go faster than you. 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 and how do you actually do that? All right. So a lot of the rabbits that we've been able to pull out of hats, I obviously can't talk about.

41:34Isaiah Taylor:There's some amazing stories that we'll tell someday, but one that I will talk about, just one small example. It was very important to us to demonstrate that we could move this reactor via C-17. 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. So we were like, we want to actually fly this thing. And 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 load masters on, okay, what is this plant going to experience in flight?

42:17Isaiah Taylor:We did engineering studies on our side to figure out, is the plant going to survive the transportation you know we had people um 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 you know snap an important component um 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, re-engineering 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.

42:57Isaiah Taylor:And we get to three days left until we fly, right? The secretary of energy is going to be flying with us. The undersecretary of war is 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 the load master at the base where we're going to take off from and he says guys uh the loader truck that is supposed to load your reactor onto the c-17 um cannot take the loads of this vessel your vessel is too heavy for the loader truck and i think this is actually two days before um 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 you know it would work for other reasons right we have to do a test run and so uh our steel team uh got together and said what if we just built a truck with 48 hours notice and um they started working on it they started drafting we took the existing specs of the truck we took the existing existing specs of the vessel and um 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 those pallets and we basically just said start sending us engineering drawings right and so we we got into okay what's the exact interface between the pallet loading system and the the base wheeling system in 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 by these rollers and you have to weld them into the line so they could actually roll the the pallets onto it and yeah many many old all-nighters pulled throughout that process in 48 hours from the mission having that come up so honestly a lot of having the ability to pull rabbits out of hats is having a team that is utterly relentless um 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 um and you know obviously nuclear is a big market 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 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 yeah when things go wrong and you the timeline slips or you predict that it could slip yeah things don't go your way yeah what does going into wartime mode in war room look like my chief of staff is laughing over here because she knows what war what wartime looks like um yeah i mean i i think like i 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 uh people who do not tell you what is going on in extreme detail i hate generalities uh you know 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 uh and if that takes you 30 seconds to give me an answer to a one word question that's okay that's probably like one of the that'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 um 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 to what the actual root truth is.

47:55Isaiah Taylor:I have a friend, Josh Steinman, who actually 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 who's 15 minutes. Awesome, awesome line. And this is really true about diagnosing problems like there is somebody in the world who 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 and finding out who it is and getting to them 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 what are the best examples one example you know that i'll give is um to credit my nuclear review team here my nuclear licensing team um 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.

49:25Isaiah Taylor:And it's, and it's especially big because we actually have power operations that we're planning for here and it's not a deal. It didn't start as a DOE site. And so there's all of these layers of complexity have to come through. And a couple months ago, um, we realized that, um, you know, again, and I think it was like in a standup, we, we started asking like okay what's critical back to this what's critical back 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 in our work product that was imminently due in order to stay on timeline and so we called a war room uh there is a a trailer just over there so if you walk like 200 feet that way there's like a construction trailer um and we said clear out the trailer set up chair set up a screen and um call in everybody who is not working on hardware critical path people who have nothing to do with the nuclear operation uh 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 uh working on this problem and asking the question of how do we solve the next problem until it is done.

50:48Isaiah Taylor: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 find somebody who knows the answer to that question? And it was over a weekend. I made this call on, I think it was a Friday morning and the war room wrapped up on a Tuesday morning. So yeah, it's a maniacal search of truth and then being willing to do unreasonable things to fix problems. 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.

51:28And 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 injects urgency yeah so with this sort of thing how are you thinking about like injecting as much urgency as possible yeah in the right places yeah elon is like probably

51:48Isaiah Taylor:the greatest to ever do this right like he he gets 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 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 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 this you could list out every single piece of work that has to get done in order to go to the moon, let's say.

52:30Isaiah Taylor: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 um honestly it's it's just a lot of what we hire for and it's a lot of like why people join valor like a lot of people join valor because they've been watching they've loved nuclear for a long time they think that nuclear is the right way to re-industrialize the united states they think that it's the only way that we're going to you know be able to get cheap power back in the u.s maybe they're doing it because they want to stop carbon emissions from continuing to raise the ppm level and they care about climate change whatever the reason is for joining the company they know that Valor 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.

53:31Isaiah Taylor:This is one of the, I think, the least replicable and hardest to change aspects of a company's culture. You can fix many different things about a company culture. You can make the marketing better. 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, or at least let's say that you can't improve about a company. You can certainly make it worse. You can take a high-paced company and make it slow. It's very, very hard to make a slow-moving company fast.

54:09Isaiah Taylor: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. It's something that we hire for. It's a reason that people come to us. 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? Yeah. So one of these things, again, 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.

54:45Isaiah Taylor:We have a screen up in our office that shows in big red letters what is the most important work in the company at every given time. Now, of course, all the work in the company is important. And this is, I think, one of the reasons that companies don't like talking about the critical path. They fear that if you're always talking about the critical path and all the other work will get undone and people won't think it's as important. And actually, the critical path changes so much that 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.

55:14Isaiah Taylor:because that team is going to go fix that problem. They're going to figure out how to move faster. So that's one big thing. The other thing is like we just culturally talk about it constantly. And I like to do this by thinking about the future state that I care about. I want Valor to be in a position where we are turning on nuclear reactors every hour. 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 the you know a reactor standing there in thermal testing okay well we need to get a reactor in thermal testing as fast as we 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.

56:14Isaiah Taylor: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$2.5 million machine shop standing there in a month, right? Okay, so there's the critical path to, you know, where we were about 18 months ago. So yeah, and like a huge part of this is, it really is cultural. The whole team and the whole company has to think this way all the time. 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.

56:50Isaiah Taylor:But you have to think holistically. Everyone has to think about the whole company and what is going to make us move the fastest. Initially, you were going to go to the Philippines and build some reactor out there. And then 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? Yeah, I don't think we reset the North Star. The North Star is make energy 10 times cheaper.

57:24Isaiah Taylor: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 um and you know it's just a huge credit to the team that they can roll like that um because they 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.

58:08Isaiah Taylor: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? The first time that I met you, I think I woke up, I was sleeping on top of, you know, I guess this is lab at Rainmaker. I woke up, I take off my sleep mask and I see you walking across the floor on the phone hustling.

58:45And 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

58:59Isaiah Taylor:the last two and a half years how has Isaiah evolved 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.

59:49It just is, I hoped to see that.

59:53Isaiah Taylor:but actually seeing that in your team is one of the most rewarding feelings on earth. I had a theory about how the nuclear industry was structured, but I wasn't sure yet. 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, you know, 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?

1:00:30Isaiah Taylor: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? And so I've learned that, yes, there are deep problems in how the nuclear industry is formatted, but there are a huge amount of people who want to go fast. And so that's a powerful thing that we get to do is unlock those people and let them run. It's important to talk about safety and what makes reactors dangerous and also what makes this sort of thing very safe. Can you just talk about the sizing and how everything works? Yeah. So there's like, let's break down what nuclear safety is and why.

1:01:08Isaiah Taylor: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 is 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 uranium atom and is now a bunch of other random atoms and those those atoms are radioactive they produce gamma rays and those gamma rays at enough dose are harmful to your body and could kill you.

1:02:04Isaiah Taylor:So there's this 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 radioactive fission products to be distributed into the air or into the water or into the field next door.

1:02:43Isaiah Taylor: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 a chain reaction right so one uranium atom splits it creates uh roughly two neutrons those two can go cost two more fissions now you have four neutrons those four go create 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.

1:03:26Isaiah Taylor:Now, the danger is that an exponential growth function is exponential. And so you need that curve to taper. 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. 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. I hesitate to talk negatively about the traditional nuclear industry, because the fact is traditional nuclear is the safest form of energy on Earth.

1:04:07Isaiah Taylor:Even with all of 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 in u-238 to to moderate that um but it's still a piece of engineering that you have to treat very carefully and get right.

1:04:52Isaiah Taylor: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 a meltdown is actually through the inherent physics of the plant itself. 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.

1:05:31Isaiah Taylor: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. And specifically in a graphite reactor, graphite has really, really high thermal inertia. And it's really good at spreading that heat out. It's 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.

1:06:09Isaiah Taylor: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 you 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 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.

1:06:41Isaiah Taylor: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 it in 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. 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 in 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 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.

1:07:37Isaiah Taylor: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. 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.

1:08:11Isaiah Taylor: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 and eventually those temperatures exceed the structural temperatures on the core and you have any number of things happen 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 a hundred times safer than existing nuclear power plant.

1:08:53Isaiah Taylor:What I mean is we already talked about thermal runaway, right? So this is a very strongly negative thermal feedback of reactivity, 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 is also just really small and it's made of graphite. And the fact that it's small and made of graphite are massive advantages. 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 and getting the graphite hotter because it takes a huge amount of energy to heat graphite up and so a lot of the decay heat in a graphite reactor gets absorbed with just making the graphite hotter and by the way graphite has a melting point it actually doesn't melt it sublimates, but it has a sublimation point of around 3000 degrees Celsius.

1:09:51Isaiah Taylor:So it can get extraordinarily hot. The other important aspect of this is that we use a fuel called Triso. So Triso is 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 eventually burst. And you have fission products leaking around inside the reactor. Triso can get very, very hot before it gets compromised over 2 ,000 degrees. 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 a lot of the K-heat is taken care of by just allowing the core heat up.

1:10:38Isaiah Taylor: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. So as a cylinder gets bigger, the walls of a cylinder, the surface area of a cylinder scales with the square, whereas the volume of cylinder scales with the cube. Right. So what that means is a really big cylinder has a small surface area and a huge volume and 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 and ultimately the heat from the decay products just escape through the walls of the vessel passively.

1:11:13Isaiah Taylor:right they just get convected and radiated from the walls of the vessel 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 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 where the graphite would be compromised and then it would start to taper off. And what's awesome about Valor is that that statement is not a theoretical statement.

1:11:47Isaiah Taylor: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 shield and to mimic the Citadel. 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 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.

1:12:40Isaiah Taylor:So really what all of this leads to is that when we talk about nuclear safety in the terms of the plants of our 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. 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 these different countries competing and the US kind of like tapers off in the early 2000s.

1:13:17And 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 in 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?

1:13:50Isaiah Taylor:It's so important that people understand that these things are possible in technology, right? And it'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 ask people in the early 2000s if you showed people that graph beforehand they'd be just like no there's no way that's science fiction right like you're 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 the loser in an industry as a country to like stratospheric change.

1:14:31Isaiah Taylor:And that is exactly what we are trying to do here. And it flows into really every choice that Valor has made. 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 is for using triso because people are like triso is super expensive and I'm like well one we're gonna make it cheap so that's fine but you know like it's 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.

1:15:21Isaiah Taylor:But 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 that 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 have a, you know, 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.

1:15:59Isaiah Taylor: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 gonna go build a reactor and it's gonna turn on budget life forth and like maybe like we'll see um 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 to suspend disbelief for a while and then you watch it happen.

1:16:44Isaiah Taylor:But in that suspension of disbelief and in these beliefs of being able to build tens of thousands, you have to make real trade-offs 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? And HDGR is not a high power density reactor, 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 that and pace right doing it fast and doing it many times is is in the long term and by long term I mean five to ten years the only thing that will matter and in order to do that you have to have some simplicity and you have to have safety which leads you to a high the approximate size that we're that we're talking about here so yeah scale i think is 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 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 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 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 Bill to realize it.

1:18:36Isaiah Taylor:Um, it's maybe 50, 50, uh, but, um, 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, uh, 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 I've 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 if people don't like it people really really hate looking dumb and I kind of embrace 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 they like gives you access to the root truth of the world because no one else is willing to look dumb enough to to go find out on the like hit pieces point did you learn anything from Palmer I have always appreciated Palmer for not letting it slide.

1:20:03Isaiah Taylor:He's actually a very warlike person. He's a very nice person, but he's always at war with somebody. But that's the nature of reality. Every CEO is at war. A lot of CEOs are in denial that they're at war. They want to try to think about something else. They want to go to the beach or whatever. That's something that I very much appreciate about Palmer. Um, you know, actually shout out to him for in the early days of the company, he was one of the first like well-known people, uh, to like vocally defend us and come to our defense. Uh, when we were in the early days with this crazy vision that we wanted to go fast and, um, you know, spent a lot of time actually defending me on Twitter, uh, in the, in the early days where people were saying this guy's a high school dropout.

1:20:49Isaiah Taylor:Like, what is he doing? You can't do this without a nuclear PhD. Um, so yeah, I will always be very appreciative of that. 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? Things have like a certain amount of inevitable time.

1:21:22Isaiah Taylor:like there are certain things that even if you have the most talented people in the world in front of you and all the tools and all 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 can 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 know it's if you think 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 I say that a lot.

1:21:57Isaiah Taylor:I guess maybe there's like ways that you could use like electromagnetism or something to heat it up. Actually, someone should think about that. Can you just like microwave parts to heat your... Anyway, this is a distraction. Maybe someone's already doing that. I'll bet someone's already doing that. The point is there are like irreducible time, you know, there are irreducible time frames 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 one of the really unique things about valor 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 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.

1:22:41Isaiah Taylor:I mean, actually, my grandmother was born in a national lab, literally. My grandmother was born in Oak Ridge. So I have a deep affection for them. But if we were to go try to turn this plant on 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. And there's irreducible clock time. I think one of the big things that people don't understand is just two different types of time.

1:23:16Isaiah Taylor:There's normal time and there's clock time. And 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. 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? The clock time is not like that. And 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.

1:23:58Isaiah Taylor:That's very possible. so there's an art to that um and i think valor has stepped out and you know honestly we're taking 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 going to see those those clocks uh 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 with an air an irreducible clock time problem you can't throw money at it uh this is one big mistake that the nuclear industry has 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 only raised a few million dollars one of the most common complaints that I got was like, you haven't raised enough money, you're not gonna be able to win.

1:24:53Isaiah Taylor: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 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 that was true. So yeah, clock time. And in 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 fundamentally, that's what's going to allow you to win. 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.

1:25:35And then they end up being problems. They're effectively like unknown bottlenecks, unpredictability. How are you trying to think for, I don't know, a year or two years, maybe more to figure out where are 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 deadlines next week and you just didn't even realize that it was a problem until now.

1:25:57Isaiah Taylor: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 organization pace that's extremely high, you will be able to figure out a lot of different ways to succeed. Right. And, and some things that look like, you know, irreducible bottlenecks, you could figure out a way around, you could engineer a way around, et cetera. 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.

1:26:38Isaiah Taylor:Like, and And obviously this plant is not ready for that. This one's not ready to be made a million times. But we learned some lessons on this that will contribute to doing this a million times. And so, yeah, you have to think backwards from what needs to be true for this to take place. And then the other thing is you have to have a certain amount of paranoia. I have a hard time going to sleep at night thinking about all the different possible bottlenecks that might present. And that's the downside of being a founder. You're going to have to do that. But when we were walking through, you said, you know, for this one, we are going to have all the wires underneath the floor.

1:27:12But for future ones that we want it to just be modular. And so you can just plop this crate down and suddenly it all fits together and works. Yep. What all like learnings have you have you gotten from this initial facility?

1:27:22Isaiah Taylor:Yeah. I mean, we've had thousands of things that we've learned here. um i mean honestly really simple things about like how do we serialize concrete um 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 um 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 um because they are really really valuable honestly like these these lessons these like painful lessons we've learned like are our moat and they're the value of the company 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 yeah how do you actually do that what does that look like i actually don't think it works that way by the way okay like what you're saying we're like oh now i'm ready to scale um 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 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 out it's going to make power we're about 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 that 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 uh 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 um but uh uh but you know this is something i think the nuclear industry does too much is they're like oh we're gonna 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 um you know i would say that valor has been just built from the first day of the company to do that let's end it on what does july 4th of this year signify i think that july 4th will be a rebirth for the nuclear industry in the united states um it's not just symbolic obviously it's the 250th anniversary of the united states it's the deadline for the july 4th reactor program uh the nuclear pilot program created by eo14301 um 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 and startups and other companies who have designed much better plants 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.

1:31:05Isaiah Taylor:So I think the meaning of what's going to happen in July 4th is we're going to, 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 the things that we care about as a country and to make energy as cheap as we possibly can.