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

**Ti Morse** (0:00)
Today, I'm sitting down with Isaiah Taylor, the founder of Valar Atomics at their first reactor test site in Utah. 12 months ago, there was nothing here. Now, there's a massive reactor in our background. And in about three or four weeks, this thing is gonna go critical, I believe, for the first time.

**Isaiah Taylor** (0:14)
That's the goal. Yeah, and actually in September, there was nothing here. This was a bare patch of dirt in September. We released a video of us doing a groundbreaking and doing some bedrock blasting, and now we're sitting here in front of what we hope will be the first advanced reactor to make power in American history. So it's been a wild nine months.

**Ti Morse** (0:32)
This is a fascinating problem because up until now, it's just basically in this R&D phase of getting through regulatory hurdles and making sure that the thing actually works. And then as soon as you turn it on, it turns into a manufacturing problem. And you have to then scale to like, we were at your next facility today, where you're going to try to build like 100 a year. So what does the scale up look like? What does that ramp look like?

**Isaiah Taylor** (0:52)
Yeah, I would relate this a lot to the Falcon 9 actually. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to build a reactor, which is easy to replicate. It's a little bit different from mass manufacturing, right? Different from like a Tesla style problem, more like a SpaceX style problem. So you have a complicated vehicle that you need to get really good at building in a repeatable fashion and deploying in a repeatable fashion, but it's not like mass production, right? So that's a really unique area. And I actually think it's an area that we can be uniquely good at. In the United States, we have some really talented people who work on objects of about this size and very similar manufacturing methods. And we've actually designed the reactor around that. So when I first started the company, we actually didn't have a size in mind for the first reactor. And it was very explicit. We told the team, we don't know how big the reactor is. We don't know how powerful it is. We didn't know those numbers until probably a year to 18 months into the company.
We told ourselves we are going to discover the power level through the manufacturing process. So we are going to go out to how do you build a reactor that's easy to build? How do we use supply chains that already exist? How do we use tooling that already exists? And that will yield a certain size and a certain shape. And then you work backwards through normal core power density to a power output. And our instinct was as long as that number turns out to be somewhere above 15 megawatts, we should be pretty good for mass production. If you are under 15 megawatts, it's pretty hard to scale the right way. You just end up doing so many different pieces of operations and it becomes more complicated. But our feeling is above the 15 megawatt break point, you have something that can really scale. And we think this ends up somewhere around 25 megawatts. So 25 megawatts being that sort of scale factor. If you want a gigawatt, you do 40 of them.
So, you know, the next challenge for us to figure out as we turn this on and turn the next one on and turn the next one on is how do we get to the place where we are turning on a reactor every day and then multiple reactors every day. And that's how we're going to climb into the gigawatts. It's not going to be these really large scale plants.

**Ti Morse** (2:58)
What does the process look like going from just the first reactor to the first like 10?

**Isaiah Taylor** (3:04)
A whole lot of pain and suffering.
It's hard, like it's really, really hard because what you would want to do and I think what people in the nuclear industry have tried to do is iterate in the design and you keep trying to design better and design better and design better. You maybe even have supply chain conversations. You go out and talk to suppliers and a few years down the road, you think you have something that's really manufacturable. But we know from experience that the first time you go to build something, it doesn't work like you designed it, right? And your analysis was wrong in this way and that way. And guess what? The supplier that you thought was awesome, turns out they didn't deliver on time or at all, or they can only deliver half of what they thought they could and so you end up having vertically integrated. So it's very counterintuitive, but the only way to go from one to ten is to turn one on and then turn another one on and then try to turn on two and then try to turn on three.