How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor

**Isaiah Taylor** (0:00)
Welcome to War250, first advanced reactor to ever make power by a startup.
We did something pretty awesome today. The first ever AI chip powered by a nuclear reactor. First TRISO reactor to turn on in over 50 years in the United States.

**Sarah Guo** (0:15)
How much of the premise of Valar is possible now comes from increasing demands for power in the United States, largely driven by AI compute.

**Isaiah Taylor** (0:26)
Energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price. If you can figure out how to make energy cheaper, you will have demand. When SpaceX started going, people were like, there's no way they're gonna hit the numbers that they're hitting today. Most of the nuclear industry is a modeling and simulation industry. They're not focused on hardware iteration, hardware execution, building the simplest and safest reactor that allows them to scale. And Valar just demonstrated that we are.

**Sarah Guo** (0:56)
Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Isaiah Taylor, the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics. We're here in their Utah nuclear facility, where we're gonna do a tour, talk about why speed and scale are the only path to making nuclear reactors in the United States again, why energy is the only input to our hyper-techno-industrial future, and why there's an open regulatory environment for progress in energy R&D for the first time in years.
Welcome. Isaiah, thanks so much for doing this.

**Isaiah Taylor** (1:25)
Of course. Welcome to Valar Atomics at San Rafael. Thanks for coming.

**Sarah Guo** (1:29)
So what is, what are you doing here at Valar?

**Isaiah Taylor** (1:31)
We are making nuclear reactors built for planetary scale. So nuclear fission is kind of an old technology. It's around the 1940s that we really started working on it.
And we've built a lot of nuclear reactors, but we've never built them for mass scale. Nuclear's never had its Ford moment or its Tesla moment, if you want to put it that way. And that's what Valar Atomics is working on doing. We have nuclear reactors that are more manufactured than constructed, and they're extremely safe. And we think the combination of these two things is going to allow us to scale nuclear fission and make energy 10 times cheaper for humanity. So that's what we're working on.

**Sarah Guo** (2:05)
We're going to dig into why you think this is possible and why you're making it happen after decades of no real activity in this space. But first, for you personally, you don't have the credentialed decades of nuclear research background that is often required to work in the space.
Why you and what triggered it?

**Isaiah Taylor** (2:26)
I have been reluctant to start this company for a long time, and eventually did out of sheer frustration that nobody else was working on it with the pace required and understanding the scale that would be required.
I think any problem that you want to work on that's as hard as this, you have to really, really believe in it. After a certain amount of time, I just realized that I was never going to stop thinking about this, and so I might as well build it. It started for me, my great-grandfather was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were both in the Secret City during World War II. And I just grew up thinking about nuclear as this incredible technology. I've always wanted to build thousands of machines. I didn't know which ones I was going to build. It was just very clear to me since I was like six that I was supposed to build thousands of machines.
And at some point, I went from thinking about nuclear as like a totally solved problem, right, which was my first, you know, outside view of the industry. It was like, okay, people know how to build reactors. They're doing fine at it. To suddenly realizing that this was an entirely unsolved problem that we sort of thought we solved in the 60s and there was like a good run into the 70s. And then we suddenly stopped. So I came to that realization. It was very disorienting for me, actually. I suddenly realized it, actually. I remember the afternoon when I was like, wait a minute. Did we actually stop building reactors in the 70s? Why did nobody tell me that?
And really since that moment, I had been obsessively trying to understand why. And I came to some conclusions about why when I was in high school. And I still hold those conclusions today. And then it was a 10-year journey of waiting for someone to solve the problem, watching every nuclear startup that popped up, trying to figure out if they were going to solve the problem. And eventually realizing that no one was going to solve it at the pace and scale that was necessary. And so I started Valar.