---
show: "Relentless"
title: "Manufacturing 1,000s of Nuclear Reactors | Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics"
date: 2026-07-01
url: https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics
audio: https://crgcigsh7ux7bpo1.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/trex-audio/relentless/741f8477-9900-4622-a7cc-17469acc4490/1.mp3
speakers: ["Ti Morse","Isaiah Taylor"]
---

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

_Relentless_

## About

**Ti Morse.** Ti Morse is the creator and host of Relentless, a podcast featuring long-form interviews with founders about building and scaling companies. His guests have included Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck and Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, with conversations spanning aerospace, manufacturing, defense technology and entrepreneurship.

**Isaiah Taylor.** Isaiah Taylor is the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics. The company develops standardized nuclear reactors and combines their design, construction and operation in a single business, with the aim of supplying abundant energy at industrial scale.

## Operating Wisdom

1. **Start work with fixed calendar lead times early; hiring more engineers cannot buy back elapsed time.**
   _Isaiah Taylor on deciding which work must start in parallel at nuclear startup Valar Atomics._
   > “I think one of the big things that people don't understand is there's two different types of time. There's, like, normal time, and there's clock time, right? And clock time stops for no man, right? Clock time keeps ticking, no matter if you're Elon Musk or you're, you know, a dude on the street, right? Clock time just keeps ticking. So clock time is the most valuable and most difficult asset. There's other types of time, right? Like, an engineer hour is, like, a fungible type of time, or you just hire 10 more engineers, and now you have 10 times the time, right? But clock time is not like that. And, um, you know, we have to start the clock ticking on really, really important things as soon as you can. Now, you can go overboard with this and start some clocks that you weren't ready for yet and distract yourselves and lose focus and fail. That's very possible. So there's an art to that.” — Isaiah Taylor, [1:23:12](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s268)

2. **Before funding months of simulation, check whether a physical prototype would answer the question faster and more cheaply.**
   _Isaiah Taylor on Valar Atomics' rule that steel is cheaper than software engineers._
   > “And so in- at Valor, we, we have a phrase, which is that steel is cheaper than software engineers. So, like, software engineers, like, are actually very expensive. You, you think, "Okay, we wanna understand, uh, the nature of this problem. We wanna do a really good design, and we're gonna do that through analysis," right? If you're doing that through analysis, you're paying software engineers, and the software engineers are gonna go and y- you know, come up with this perfect imperfect world model. Uh, and then they're gonna test against this world model, and you're gonna be a couple months later with an answer. And if you add up the, you know, salary cost of the people on that team over that amount of time, and then you go and say, "How much steel could I have bought for that amount of money?" It turns out you could buy a lot of steel for the same amount of money that you got a software answer. And for that amount, you probably could have welded it together and gotten an answer in the real world. Um, and we find this to be true over and over again. You know, when we first started saying this to ourselves, it was sort of a joke, and then we realized, like, "Oh, this is really true," like, s- to an order of, like, 5 or 10x in many cases.” — Isaiah Taylor, [10:08](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s25)

3. **Hire for pace from the beginning, because changing a slow company's tempo can be harder than starting a new company.**
   _Isaiah Taylor on why Valar Atomics treats operating speed as a hiring criterion._
   > “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. This is one of the, I think, the least replicable and, um, hardest to change aspects of a company's culture. Um, you can fix many different things about a company culture. You can make the marketing better. Um, you can even increase the talent of the engineering team. You can fix your finances. You can make your FP&A processes better. But pace is, I think, one of the only things that you can't change about a company and... Or at least, let's say, that you can't improve about a company. Um, you can certainly make it worse. Um, you can take a high-paced company and make it slow. It's very, very hard to make a slow-moving company fast. Um, I would argue nine times out of 10, it's easier to start a whole new company than to try to take a slow-moving company and make it fast. So i- it's just, you know, it's something that we take extraordinarily seriously. Um, it's something that we hire for. It's a reason that people come to us.” — Isaiah Taylor, [53:21](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s180)

4. **Own the full path from design to operation so the company has an incentive to eliminate costs that separate suppliers simply pass along.**
   _Isaiah Taylor on why Valar Atomics designs, manufactures, installs and operates its reactors._
   > “So our strategy at Valor is we do everything. We pick a, a patch of land. We've clear it. We build a reactor. We manu- We design the reactor. We engineer the reactor. We manufacture it. We put it on the site. We plug it in, and then we operate it. And when we own that entire scope, we are incentivized to make it as effective as possible. We're incentivized to say, "Does that thing really need to cost, like, a million dollars when it's actually 50 c- you know, 50 grand of steel? Like, does that actually make sense? Does that thing need to cost $5 million when it, you know, you could replicate the same function with, like, a couple hundred thousand dollars of, of equipment?" Like, those are the questions that just don't really get asked in nuclear today because there are so many different parties and different vendors and different responsibilities fractured between design and engineering and EPC and operations and, at the end of the day, it's the ratepayer, you know, who, who pays that cost, right? So, uh, you know, taking this as a, an entire market that we do well, uh, is really what's gonna fix that problem.” — Isaiah Taylor, [13:37](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s41)

5. **Let available tooling and supply chains determine product specifications rather than fixing specifications before learning how to build.**
   _Isaiah Taylor left Valar Atomics' reactor size and power undecided for 12–18 months while exploring manufacturing constraints._
   > “So when I first started the company, we actually didn't have a size in mind for the first reactor. Um, and it, it was very explicit. We told the team, uh, "We don't know how big the reactor is. We don't know how powerful it is." Uh, we didn't know those numbers until probably a year to 18 months into the company. We told ourselves we are going to discover the power level through the manufacturing process. So we're gonna go out to, how do you build a reactor that's easy to build? How do we use supply chains that already exist? How do we use tooling that already exists? And that will yield a certain size and a certain shape, and then you work backwards through normal core power density to a power output. And, you know, our, our instinct was, as long as that number turns out to be somewhere above 15 megawatts, we should be pretty good for mass production. Um, if you're under 15 megawatts, it's pretty hard to scale the right way. You just end up doing so many different pieces of operations that it becomes more complicated. But our feeling is above the 15-megawatt break point, you have something that can really scale, and, uh, we think this ends up somewhere around 25 megawatts.” — Isaiah Taylor, [01:34](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s6)

6. **Scaling begins with building successive units, not with finishing a design and declaring it ready for production.**
   _Isaiah Taylor challenges nuclear companies that treat scaling as a phase after engineering and design._
   > “uh, but you know, this is something that 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.” — Isaiah Taylor, [1:29:07](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s290)

## Character Wisdom

1. **Be willing to look foolish in any room rather than let protecting your reputation get in the way of finding the truth.**
   _Asked what distinguishes his thinking, Isaiah Taylor names his tolerance for looking dumb as a competitive advantage._
   > “I have a very high tolerance for looking dumb. Uh, that's one of my secret weapons is like I am perfectly fine looking like an idiot, and, uh, I've done it a lot. I've had a good amount of practice looking like an idiot. Some of those times were because I was, and a lot of those times were because, you know, I was right, and it took a while for people to realize it. 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.” — Isaiah Taylor, [1:18:15](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s251)

2. **Ask a community whether it wants your project, and be honest that startup failure could wipe out the jobs you promise.**
   _Isaiah Taylor on meeting residents and local leaders before choosing a site for Valar Atomics' nuclear reactors._
   > “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. Uh, we get to know people. We get to know the city council. You know, half the s- you know, the people sitting in that office over there, uh, 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 'cause we're building a nuclear reactor in your backyard." 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 gonna come out of that might not happen, right? We're gonna 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.” — Isaiah Taylor, [33:35](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s116)

3. **Respect the people who pour themselves into building something and still return each morning willing to rethink it.**
   _Asked how leading Valar Atomics changed him, Isaiah Taylor describes his growing respect for the reactor team._
   > “I have come to, uh, gain massive, massive respect for, uh, amazing technology leaders and technologists, um, in this company. Um, it's not that, you know -- It, it's really just like you don't know what it's gonna feel like until you do it. And, uh, 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, uh, and to take the next step, like, I don't know, it just is, uh -- I hoped to see that, but actually seeing that in your team is one of the most rewarding feelings on Earth.” — Isaiah Taylor, [59:02](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s199)

4. **Remember the people who defended you publicly before you had broad acceptance.**
   _Isaiah Taylor expresses gratitude to Palmer for defending him when critics dismissed his lack of a nuclear PhD._
   > “I have always appreciated Palmer for, um, not letting, like... Not letting it slide, right? Like, he is, you know, he's actually a very warlike person. He's a very nice person, but he's, he's, like, always at war with, like, somebody, uh... But, like, that's the, the nature of reality is, like, every CEO is at war. They're just, like, a lot of CEOs are, like, kind of in denial that they're at war. They wanna try to, like, think about something else, so they wanna go to the beach or whatever. And, um, yeah, like, I- that's something that I very much, very much appreciate, uh, about Palmer. And, um, you know, actually shout out to, 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, i- in the early days, where people were saying, "This guy's a high school dropout," like, "What is he doing? You can't do this without a nuclear PhD." Um, so yeah, I, I will always be, uh, very appreciative of that.” — Isaiah Taylor, [1:19:54](https://transcriptosaur.com/e/relentless/manufacturing-1-000s-of-nuclear-reactors-isaiah-taylor-valar-atomics#s257)

## Transcript

**Ti Morse** [00:32]: 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, you know, we were at your next facility, uh, today, where you're gonna try to build like 100 a year. So what does the scale-up look like? What does that ramp look like?

**Isaiah Taylor** [00:52]: Yeah, you know, I would relate this a lot to, uh, 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, uh, area, and I actually think it's a, 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, uh, very similar manufacturing methods, and we've actually designed the reactor around that.

**Isaiah Taylor** [01:34]: So when I first started the company, we actually didn't have a size in mind for the first reactor. Um, and it, it was very explicit. We told the team, uh, "We don't know how big the reactor is. We don't know how powerful it is." Uh, we didn't know those numbers until probably a year to 18 months into the company. We told ourselves we are going to discover the power level through the manufacturing process. So we're gonna 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [02:11]: And, you know, our, our instinct was, as long as that number turns out to be somewhere above 15 megawatts, we should be pretty good for mass production. Um, if you're under 15 megawatts, it's pretty hard to scale the right way. You just end up doing so many different pieces of operations that it becomes more complicated. But our feeling is above the 15-megawatt break point, you have something that can really scale, and, uh, we think this ends up somewhere around 25 megawatts. So 25 megawatts being that, that sort of scale factor. If you want a gigawatt, you do 40 of them. So, you know, the next challenge for us to figure out as we turn this on and turn the next one on and turn the next one on is, how do we get to the place where we are turning on a reactor every day, and then multiple reactors every day? And that's how we're gonna climb into the gigawatts.

**Isaiah Taylor** [02:55]: It's not gonna be these really large scale plants.

**Ti Morse** [02:58]: What does the, like, process look like going from just the first reactor to the first, like, 10?

**Isaiah Taylor** [03:04]: A whole lot of pain and suffering. Um, it's hard. Like, it's really, really hard because what you would want to do, and I think what people in the nuclear industry have tried to do, is iterate in the design, and you keep trying to design better and design better and design better. You maybe even have supply chain conversations. You go out and talk to suppliers and, you know, a few years down the road, you think you have something that's really manufacturable. But we know from experience that the first time you go to build something, it doesn't work like you designed it, right? And your analysis was wrong in this way and that way, and guess what? The supplier that you thought was awesome, turns out they didn't deliver on time or at all.

**Isaiah Taylor** [03:45]: Um, or, you know, they can only deliver half of what they thought they could, and, and so you end up having to vertically integrate it. So it's very counterintuitive, but the only way to go from one to 10, uh, is to turn one on and then turn another one on, and then try to turn on two, and then try to turn on three. And through this process, you will uncover all of these things that were fundamentally unknowable. You just could not have predicted at the 10th what it would have taken to get to, to the 10th. And so, you know, I think this is what sets Valor apart. Um, this is where we're really, really unique.

**Isaiah Taylor** [04:18]: We really-- We know that we need to get to hundreds of reactors, but we know that the path to hundreds is through turning one on and getting good at that, and then turning another one and, and going through that, you know, that really detailed process of learning.

**Ti Morse** [04:32]: I don't know how people kind of came to the conclusion that iterating on paper made sense. This has not worked anywhere else, and so what do you th- Like, how did that happen?

**Isaiah Taylor** [04:41]: Yeah, you know, I think that in nuclear it's particularly tempting because nuclear operations are really, really hard. Like, it's just really hard to split an atom, not from a, a technical standpoint. It's actually pretty easy to, to split an atom from a technical standpoint. But from the perspective of operationally being a company that can build a core, uh, can fuel it, and then take it critical, that is actually a really, really hard thing to do, um, in, you know, in terms of making sure that your analysis systems are actually good, right? Does your analysis lead to something that, you know, becomes real in the physical world? Do you have security? Do you have MCNA? Uh, you know, do you have a really good operations team that understands what they're doing? Does the regulator agree with you on all of those things?

**Isaiah Taylor** [05:26]: Right? So because iteration is so difficult in nuclear, people have just sort of defaulted to design, right? 'Cause you can do design on paper, right? And, uh, and so that's really what we've been, we, what we've been doing. The, the other thing is I think that people, um, look back to an era of nuclear where it was more possible to do th- some, some things in design land. Um, what I mean is it, there's a certain period in, in nuclear history where you had sort of like the EPC-driven, uh, style of building nuclear plants, and it, it kind of worked. And the reason it kind of worked was because we had already done a lot of fundamental R&D In real world tests, right? So the Atomic Energy Commission turned on 70 different nuclear reactor prototypes.

**Isaiah Taylor** [06:10]: The Navy ran all of these different nuclear reactor prototypes. And then we also had a very healthy EPC industry in terms of combustion plants, right? So gas and, and coal plants. And so you kind of took those two things together, and you could sort of throw that into an engineering context and do some plant engineering and throw it to an EPC, and you'd get a plant out of it. None of those things are true today. Like, we haven't been turning on 70 test reactors. We don't have that, you know, huge core of, of, of people who have just turned on 70 test reactors. And we're also not very good at even building normal plants anymore. Like, we don't build plants at the speed that we should, at the scale that we should. Uh, we don't build bridges as fast as we used to.

**Isaiah Taylor** [06:51]: We don't build, um, you know, dams and highways and all these other works of, of civil infrastructure. And so assuming that we could sort of go back to building nuclear the way that we were in the '60s and '70s just is not true. Um, and so really how we have to build nuclear now is the way that you would build any other deep technology category, which is it has to be iterative. You have to get a group of smart people together in a room. You have to start in hardware. You have to build as quickly and safely as you can and get real world data. And it really is the only way, and you will quickly learn from that. And you'll learn lessons that no matter how smart the other guys are, they will just never learn those lessons, right?

**Isaiah Taylor** [07:31]: Like, without the hardware, they just will not discover, you know, the, the painful lessons that we've learned in this plant.

**Ti Morse** [07:37]: What are a few of the things that you had on paper, you thought things were gonna work, and then you, like, have contact with reality and everything gets fucked?

**Isaiah Taylor** [07:44]: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's, like, so many of these examples, and, you know, I'm- probably some of the things I'm about to say, we'll go try the other way, and then we'll discover that it's even more painful to do the other way. So I'm, I'm even hesitant to even say some of these, these things. But, like, a good example here is this, even the, the story behind this citadel here, we had originally thought, "Okay, we're gonna have to go to modular construction on our, our nuclear shielding eventually," uh, because you really don't wanna be casting on site. Like, when we get to scaled production of nuclear reactors, and we wanna turn on a reactor every day, we can't be pouring concrete and doing, like, rebar work and form work before we go and turn a reactor on. So we have to get to modular shielding.

**Isaiah Taylor** [08:25]: And, you know, three months into the process of figuring out how do we actually make modular shielding, we're, like, banging our heads against the wall, and we're like, "This is impossible." Like, this is ... We've given ourselves an impossible challenge. And so I directed the team, like, "Screw this. We're not doing modular shielding this time. Like, let's figure out ... Like, just pour it in place," right? Like, you know, we'll, we'll tackle that later. And we spent a couple weeks, like, figuring out how to pour in place, and we realized, "Oh, that will add two months to schedule." Like, we'll actually just add two months where we can't do anything because we're doing rebar, and we're doing form work, and then we're pouring, and the reactor's supposed to be inside, and we're supposed to be doing wiring. And so then we actually came back to modular, modular shielding again, um,

**Isaiah Taylor** [09:09]: and ran into the 16,000 extremely hard things that it took to get this right, where we don't have to grout this shielding. Like, that's an extraordinary thing, the fact that we can actually stack this shielding up with the crane. We've got an overhead crane here, and we just place those blocks. They don't connect together. We don't have, you know, like, bolts that, that bolt into each other. We don't have grout. It's just stacked, and that was extremely difficult to get right. Um, and you know, our engineers have, like, 15 different things. You know, we all have 15 different things in our heads that we had to run into, into a brick wall, and then work a way around it. Um, and you know, I, I just think about if you were to try to design this on paper, and we did, right?

**Isaiah Taylor** [09:50]: We did design this on paper a year ago, and it looks very different from how we originally designed it. And, like, could you, in theory, have gone through, like, 10 more design cycles to try to get here? Maybe. Um, but it would've taken, like, years to go through those design cycles.

**Ti Morse** [10:04]: A little bit more efficient to just, like, shoot the rocket up and see what happens.

**Isaiah Taylor** [10:08]: Yeah, exactly. And so in- at Valor, we, we have a phrase, which is that steel is cheaper than software engineers. So, like, software engineers, like, are actually very expensive. You, you think, "Okay, we wanna understand, uh, the nature of this problem. We wanna do a really good design, and we're gonna do that through analysis," right? If you're doing that through analysis, you're paying software engineers, and the software engineers are gonna go and y- you know, come up with this perfect imperfect world model. Uh, and then they're gonna test against this world model, and you're gonna be a couple months later with an answer. And if you add up the, you know, salary cost of the people on that team over that amount of time, and then you go and say, "How much steel could I have bought for that amount of money?"

**Isaiah Taylor** [10:48]: It turns out you could buy a lot of steel for the same amount of money that you got a software answer. And for that amount, you probably could have welded it together and gotten an answer in the real world. Um, and we find this to be true over and over again. You know, when we first started saying this to ourselves, it was sort of a joke, and then we realized, like, "Oh, this is really true," like, s- to an order of, like, 5 or 10x in many cases.

**Ti Morse** [11:09]: When we were just touring this facility, there was this amazing moment where you pointed to, like, a Conex, and it's got effectively the brain of the nuclear reactor in it.

**Isaiah Taylor** [11:17]: Yeah.

**Ti Morse** [11:17]: And you said, "If this was bought from traditional suppliers-

**Isaiah Taylor** [11:21]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [11:21]: ... it would cost something like $17 million."

**Isaiah Taylor** [11:23]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [11:23]: And I think the idiot index for nuclear is just insanely high.

**Isaiah Taylor** [11:26]: Yes.

**Ti Morse** [11:26]: How much does this cost, you know, roughly? And then what have you kind of, like, efficiencies you've been able to wring out through just doing it yourself-

**Isaiah Taylor** [11:34]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [11:34]: ... and vertically integrating?

**Isaiah Taylor** [11:35]: So I can't tell you the exact cost of what we spent o- on this plant, but I will tell you that c- we did, we achieved construction complete on this site, uh, when we had raised less than $100 million in total. Um, and obviously, we spent a lot less than that on the reactor itself. So that's extraordinary for a new nuclear reactor. And by the way, this is a, this is a real nuclear reactor. This thing makes power. Um, it hasn't turned on yet. You know, so knock on wood. We've got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks to get this thing running, but- Uh, this is not a cold criticality. This is not a critical assembly. Uh, this is a reactor that makes power. It has a cooling loop. Uh, we're gonna make thermal power out of it. It's gonna have burnup. We have full shielding 'cause we have full gamma production.

**Isaiah Taylor** [12:18]: We have, you know, full neutron flux and, um, you know, we even have helium filtration. We have activity monitoring on our, on our cooling loop. Like, it's the full thing. And, uh, cumulatively, company history, we raised less than $100 million. So that's pretty extraordinary. Now, the question is, like, how far does that go? Um, by my best math today, I believe that the idiot index of nuclear is in the hundreds, right? So the, the normal, like, a good idiot index for a product, right? So idiot index being what's the cost of the thing versus the cost of its constituent elements.

**Isaiah Taylor** [12:55]: So if you bought the elements on the commodity markets and, uh, and just added those numbers up versus the cost that you buy, uh, that you bought it for, that you built it for, a good idiot index is somewhere around, like, 10 for, like, an industrial product. For a mass-manufactured commodity product, it's, you know, it's maybe somewhere, like, six or seven. And nuclear is in the hundreds. That's, that's kind of the best estimate I can come up with is, like, in the hundreds. So what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that the industry is formatted incorrectly. It's formatted with a system of incentives where nobody's incentivized to actually do this well. Um, there are too many parties that benefit from costs increasing, right?

**Isaiah Taylor** [13:37]: So our strategy at Valor is we do everything. We pick a, a patch of land. We've clear it. We build a reactor. We manu- We design the reactor. We engineer the reactor. We manufacture it. We put it on the site. We plug it in, and then we operate it. And when we own that entire scope, we are incentivized to make it as effective as possible. We're incentivized to say, "Does that thing really need to cost, like, a million dollars when it's actually 50 c- you know, 50 grand of steel? Like, does that actually make sense? Does that thing need to cost $5 million when it, you know, you could replicate the same function with, like, a couple hundred thousand dollars of, of equipment?" Like,

**Isaiah Taylor** [14:16]: those are the questions that just don't really get asked in nuclear today because there are so many different parties and different vendors and different responsibilities fractured between design and engineering and EPC and operations and, at the end of the day, it's the ratepayer, you know, who, who pays that cost, right? So, uh, you know, taking this as a, an entire market that we do well, uh, is really what's gonna fix that problem.

**Ti Morse** [14:40]: It's a little bit like if Boeing made the plane, made the gasoline for the p- or the-

**Isaiah Taylor** [14:44]: Yep

**Ti Morse** [14:44]: ... you know, jet fuel for the plane, and then just made, you know, their optimization function was just on the ticket price.

**Isaiah Taylor** [14:50]: That's right, and had their own airline.

**Ti Morse** [14:51]: Yeah.

**Isaiah Taylor** [14:52]: Well, what's interesting about that is that that used to be the case. Um, and we called that, that airline was Trans World Airways, and, uh, the Department of Justice actually broke them up and said that you cannot be both an airplane manufacturer and an airline. And I think that was a huge mistake. I think that, um, that's one of the ways that the aviat- aviation industry went wrong is that if you have an incredible aircraft design and you're really good at manufacturing airplanes, it's hard for you to benefit from that, and you don't get that final margin, right? So if you design an aircraft that is so safe that it doesn't need pilots, you should be able to, to benefit from that as a aircraft manufacturer by selling tickets, but we actually can't do that.

**Isaiah Taylor** [15:35]: So there's a lot of structural problems in how industries are formatted that lead to things being more expensive. And I think people view nuclear as, like, an engineering problem, um, and it's a little bit deeper than that. It's, it's a, it's a complex coordination problem. You have to own engineering and design and manufacturing and operations and regulatory engagement and community engagement and talent and all of these different things to deliver the cheapest possible power that we can.

**Ti Morse** [16:02]: I know for this reactor, you're turning it on. It's gonna produce power. It's not gonna produce that much power.

**Isaiah Taylor** [16:08]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [16:08]: Um, and the next one is gonna produce significantly more. So in your mind, when you were figuring out what are basically the requirements for our first version of this thing-

**Isaiah Taylor** [16:17]: Yep

**Ti Morse** [16:17]: ... what were those? And then what are you gonna change for V2?

**Isaiah Taylor** [16:21]: Yeah. So the initial goal for this reactor is, "Let's become a nuclear company." Um, I did not allow Valor Atomic's employees to refer to us as a nuclear company before we had actually split the first atom. Um, I don't think that you should call yourself a nuclear company or a nuclear startup before you've split an atom.

**Ti Morse** [16:38]: Until then, you're a paper company?

**Isaiah Taylor** [16:40]: Y- I mean, yeah. It's, uh ... You know, uh, this is a big problem in this industry. Like, w- we, we talk a big talk, and then we don't ship product, and, um, Valor needs to be different from that. And so, you know, we, we actually, I think, like to understate what we're up to and focus on building. So you, you'll see this in, in the factory setting as well. We, we don't call what we're doing a factory. Like, if you visit our facility in Hawthorne, we call it our facility. Um, even when we move into a much larger facility, we'll call it a facility. We won't call it a factory until it's made at least two reactors of the same type. And, and that's because we really just have this focus on, we have to get back to reality. We have to get back to building. And that's really what the nuclear industry has been missing.

**Isaiah Taylor** [17:24]: We, we've been doing all sorts of things. We've been doing everything except just building reactors. And so that's really the first step here, and it's, that was the goal on this reactor is, what is the smallest, safest reactor that we can make that will actually make power? And, um, you don't want it to be too small. Smallest here means, uh, it's small enough that it's easy to build and easy to transport to our test site. Uh, if you actually make it much smaller than this, reactors which are much smaller than this are actually harder to build. Um, there's an interesting scaling law with the mean free path of a neutron, where if you try to scale reactors down, the physics gets a lot harder, and the materials get a lot harder. So this is a pure graphite reactor. Uh, the, the core is entirely graphite.

**Isaiah Taylor** [18:09]: That massively simplifies a lot of things about building a reactor and analyzing a reactor. So we basically said, "Okay, what's the size of the reactor that we know is small enough that it's easy to build, it's really, really safe, and that that architecture will scale to the final size?" And that's a really important part because we didn't want to build the reactor in a really different way to how we'd build the eventual full-scale product. It's, you know, if, if we made choices on this scale that we'd then have to go relearn everything to go bigger, there's not a whole lot of point in that. So this reactor size is very carefully chosen for all of the methods used to build this scale very well up to a much, much more powerful reactor.

**Isaiah Taylor** [18:51]: But it's small enough that it was easy for us to build quickly, it's transportable, and it's extremely safe.

**Ti Morse** [18:57]: There's this kind of thing that you mentioned earlier where you want to make sure that if you're saying, you know, something is a facility versus a factory-

**Isaiah Taylor** [19:04]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [19:04]: ... the reason that it's a factory is because it's actually produced, you know, multiple things.

**Isaiah Taylor** [19:08]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [19:09]: I think it's really important not to lie to yourself.

**Isaiah Taylor** [19:11]: Yes.

**Ti Morse** [19:12]: What other areas-

**Isaiah Taylor** [19:12]: Extraordinarily important

**Ti Morse** [19:13]: ... do people, like, very regularly lie to themselves, and maybe even you, like, initially came in with those mentalities and then had to, like, rewire your brain to say, "Here's the right thing to be going after"?

**Isaiah Taylor** [19:23]: Yeah. Um, the second part of that requires me to do f- some self-reflection. Uh, and so it might take me a second to answer because I went into, and I'm sure there are things, but I went into this from... Ho- honestly, I would like, you know, you and I talked a little bit yesterday, and I told you I started this company out of frustration. Like, frustration was probably the primary emotion going into starting this company. And it was from watching startup after startup after startup, um, quote unquote, "become a nuclear startup," right? Like you, you get some people together, you raise some money, you get out there. And I was so excited at, at every one, you know, growing up in high school, watching these different companies get started, and I was like, "Where's the reactor?"

**Isaiah Taylor** [20:08]: And I'd, I'd check in and I'd Google them, and it's like, "Where's the reactor?" And for some of these companies, we're 10 years down the road from those, from me Googling that, and there's still no reactor, right? And if I had known back then that that was gonna be the case about some of these companies, I mean, you know, I, I maybe would've even started this company even sooner, but, but I'm glad, glad that we did when we did. But yeah, I, I watched that happen enough times, I was like, "Okay, somebody needs to step into this with a mindset of, um, honestly

**Isaiah Taylor** [20:37]: backing all the way up and having a bit of humility to say, 'We don't really know how to build reactors in the United States anymore.'" Like, it looks like we do, and some EPCs do know how to build, uh, like the AP1000, but advanced reactors, SMRs, you know, which I believe is, is the form factor that will actually scale in, in how the United States works today and how we manufacture things today, we actually don't know. Like, we have designs, we have ideas, we have theories. We don't really know, uh, until we go and do it and, and build it. And so we just started the whole process and started the whole company with this idea that we don't really know how to build a, an SMR. We don't even really know how big an SMR is. We don't know exactly what it looks like,

**Isaiah Taylor** [21:19]: and the manufacturing methods are gonna teach us that. And so yeah, I, I think that's probably the, the biggest thing where people have been lying to themselves is everyone sort of thought, "We know how to do this." And, uh, I think this applies to many industries, but nuclear is one of the, one of the worst, but it applies to many industries that you don't really know how to do it if you haven't been doing it. Um, and so the, the shortest path is often to just start doing it, and that's, that's what we've done here, and it's, it's led to very, very rapid progress, faster than I think a lot of people thought was, was possible.

**Ti Morse** [21:55]: I know when Trump got elected, uh, things kind of flipped and in your mind you had, like, this opportunity that you didn't know that you were gonna have. And with the p- like, passing of the nuclear executive orders, you kind of had, you put, you gave yourself a deadline effectively-

**Isaiah Taylor** [22:09]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [22:09]: ... or helped them, you know, structure it. So you gave yourself a deadline of it roughly a year.

**Isaiah Taylor** [22:13]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [22:13]: Right? How did you basically go from that to saying, "This is the critical path of all the, you know, steps that we have to take in the timeline-"

**Isaiah Taylor** [22:23]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [22:23]: "... uh, at all to, to actually have this powered on by July 4th"?

**Isaiah Taylor** [22:26]: Yeah. I mean, it's a great question, and critical path is something that we, like, constantly obsess over at Valor. Like, if there's one over-repeated phrase at Valor, it's probably critical path. Um, we actually designed some and built some custom software to help us try to understand this. It's still very imperfect, and we still struggle to understand the, the critical path, but that's like, that's actually the nature of reality is that it is very hard to understand the critical path, and you actually just need to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about it and working on it and trying to understand it at all times, um, in order to be moving as fast as you can. I think companies are afraid to talk that way, and this is one thing that I noticed in the early days is, like,

**Isaiah Taylor** [23:09]: exploring what the critical path is makes you look stupid because it's like, "Bro, like, don't you know what's important to work on?" Um, and, like, in the early days I felt that. Like, I w- I was like, "Are my employees gonna think I'm dumb 'cause I'm asking, like, what's important to work on right now?" And, like, yeah, maybe they did the first five times I asked that question. Um, now they just think I'm annoying, which is better. Um, but yeah, like, w- we had to ask ourselves that over and over and over, and we got it wrong a bunch of times, and we got it right a bunch of times.

**Isaiah Taylor** [23:40]: But the fact that we, we maniacally focus on it every morning and many times throughout the day, and it's what I think about morning and night and daytime is, is one of the things that contributes to, to the speed that we're executing at. I think when we started off, uh, we believed that the, uh, construction was going to be the lead. I think we were surprised that, um, a combination of building integration, let's call it that, like how the reactor actually connects to the physical plant that's here, uh, ended up being, like, a lot harder than we expected and, uh, and now we know that, and now we know how to move even faster next time. Um,

**Isaiah Taylor** [24:25]: there were a lot of regulatory things that I think nobody actually really knew. Like, even the DOE, you know, who's been an incredible partner through this process, when these executive orders came out- You know, the people in the DOE who read the president's order were like, "How are we gonna do this? Like, what is our critical path to even imagining these things happening by July 4th?" Uh, and so yeah, it's been like a constant race, and like the, the answer changes every week. But the ability of a team to focus on that is incredibly important.

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

**Isaiah Taylor** [25:05]: Yeah. So there's a lot of extraordinary engineering projects that go on in the world and in, in the United States. Um, like rockets are insanely hard. Rockets are like legitimately wildly difficult pieces of technology and engineering. Um, I think I read that the... Somebody's gonna like comment on YouTube about how I'm an idiot, but like I think I read that the Raptor thrust chamber is like 300 bar or something like that. Um, that's pretty crazy. Um, and, uh, like, yeah, that, that's like a properly hard thing because if anything goes wrong, the whole rocket just blows up, right? So you have like extremely high-pressure systems, and you're mass limited.

**Isaiah Taylor** [25:50]: You don't just get to like throw a bunch of mass at it. So like rockets are properly hard. Nuclear reactors are pretty simple. Um, 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, uh, thing that ev- I find that even people in nuclear don't actually have a counterintuit- or don't have an intuitive feeling of this, but nuclear reactors will just make whatever power you pull out.

**Isaiah Taylor** [26:24]: 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, uh, what's called a thermal feedback of reactivity. So if you flow more fluid through the core, it will drop the temperature, and the reactivity will go up. And so really the, the task is just flow fluid through a nuclear core. Um, now there's all sorts of things you have to do to make sure that it's safe and make sure that you get it right. A lot of those things you can actually just address in the design space, but from a mechanical perspective, this is, I would argue, simpler than a high-performance engine.

**Isaiah Taylor** [27:03]: Like it's simpler than, you know, uh, honestly like a V8 engine that's in a high-performance car, um, and especially at the scale that those are manufactured and the tolerance they're manufactured at and, and these sorts of things. So what's really going on here in nuclear is that you need to do all this engineering, and you need to get it right while getting like 10 other things right, and that's where it's like the complexity, right? You have to get the, you have to get the, the regulatory really, really right. Um, you have to get construction right. These things have to go well on a schedule. Um, and in the face of all of that, you have to operate in an industry that just doesn't believe in going fast anymore. Uh, that is one of the, the biggest challenges that we face every single day is like, I love the nuclear industry.

**Isaiah Taylor** [27:47]: I've been, you know, watching, uh, you know, heroes move in the nuclear industry for decades, and a lot of those heroes really dislike me, like really genuously, genuinely dislike me.

**Ti Morse** [28:00]: This almost sounds like, uh, the Elon thing where he talked with like I think some astronauts or something-

**Isaiah Taylor** [28:05]: Yep. That's-

**Ti Morse** [28:05]: And they were like-

**Isaiah Taylor** [28:06]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [28:06]: ... private, you know, commercial space shouldn't exist.

**Isaiah Taylor** [28:08]: Yep, yep. Um, one of my heroes as well, actually. Uh, a couple of my heroes, uh, in the, uh, Apollo missions, uh, really, really disliked Elon as well, though I, 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 in technology is that the, the existing people there are not gonna 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 1, Chicago Pile 2, X-10, all of the work at Oak Ridge where my great-grandfather was, these things, um, did not take 5 years or 10 years or 15 years.

**Isaiah Taylor** [28:49]: And, um, obviously there were some mistakes made in the early nuclear program. You had some fatal accidents with plutonium, uh, at Los Alamos. Um, those had more to do with the weapons side and less to do with the reactor side. Um, you had SL-1 in Idaho. So there have been fatal incidents, and you do have to take nuclear safety very seriously, and you have to take industrial safety very seriously. But this is not unlike other industries, right? Rockets also explode. You know, cars crash when you're doing test drives. Um, and so it, it's a, it's part of the category of humans build difficult things, and we deal with kinetic systems, and we've overcome hard challenges. Um, so, you know, slow and safe are not the same, same thing, right?

**Isaiah Taylor** [29:33]: 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, right? So a good example of that, this plant back here, I would argue this is orders of magnitude safer than the other nuclear power plants in the United States that are light water plants. Now, light water plants are still very, very safe, to be clear, but this one's like orders of magnitude safer. And

**Isaiah Taylor** [30:17]: as a company that is moving quickly, if we're able to move fast enough, uh, we actually get to go deploy that, and that makes everyone safer, right? The fact that we get to take this safer technology to market is a function of our speed, and that will make everyone safer. So slow and safe are simply not the same thing.

**Ti Morse** [30:35]: Yeah, I think it goes from effectively, like, the safest thing is just no thing.

**Isaiah Taylor** [30:39]: Yes

**Ti Morse** [30:39]: And then if you're gonna have something, the f- safest thing is you do it a whole lot, and you get really, really good at it because you're-

**Isaiah Taylor** [30:43]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [30:43]: ... iterating so much.

**Isaiah Taylor** [30:44]: That's a good way to put it, yeah. It- once you've decided that you need energy, which we do need energy, um, then doing it often and doing it iteratively and rapidly is actually the safest way to do it.

**Ti Morse** [30:56]: Yesterday, I was talking with you, and I kinda gave this analogy of some of the other companies are basically kicking a ball into a goal-

**Isaiah Taylor** [31:03]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [31:03]: ... and you're trying to play the entire game of soccer.

**Isaiah Taylor** [31:05]: Yes

**Ti Morse** [31:05]: Because if you just learn how to kick the ball into the goal, you're missing a lot of it.

**Isaiah Taylor** [31:09]: 100%, yeah.

**Ti Morse** [31:10]: Why is this so important to just vertically integrate basically the entire business and make sure that Valor Atomics is just running the entire operation?

**Isaiah Taylor** [31:17]: Yeah. Um, that's exactly right, yeah. Other nuclear companies, uh, have many different types of business models and partnerships and places that they wanna play in the stack. Our responsibility as a company is to make energy as cheap as we possibly can. I want to make energy 10 times cheaper than it is today, and then I want to make it 10 times cheaper again after that, and that is a responsibility that we take seriously. We don't get to say, "Oh, sorry, the reactor's not gonna get any cheaper, 'cause that pump just c- you know, those suppliers just charge a lot of money for that pump." Like, we don't get to make that excuse. Uh, 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [31:58]: It's super important that you be able to shut down a nuclear reactor and, uh, 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, uh, 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, and some control rods," we got quotes back that said 18 months and 24 months and 36 months. And we came back and we said, "Well, this plant needs to turn on in a year, and so that's not happening." And not only that, but they can't get delivered the day the reactor's supposed to turn on. There's gotta be some integration and tests. And so we ended up making, uh, the control rod drive units ourselves, and we expected it to be very hard, and it was very hard.

**Isaiah Taylor** [32:41]: We went through, I mean, probably 40 major iterations of those control rod drive units, running them thousands of times up and down in our helium pressure chamber. We have a test stand back in Hawthorne that we can get up to full nuclear temperatures and pressures in helium. And I mean, that thing is just running up and down day and night, and we're discovering failure modes, and we're discovering wear patterns, and we're improving the design, and we're, you know, fixing the electronics system and the motor 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's something that we take extremely seriously at Valor.

**Isaiah Taylor** [33:26]: Um, I would, I would like to say, you know, just to brag on my team a little bit, I would like to say that we take community engagement 10 times more seriously than any other nuclear company. When we go and pick a place to build, we spend an inordinate amount of time on the ground with that community before we go set up shop. Uh, we get to know people. We get to know the city council. You know, half the s- you know, the people sitting in that office over there, uh, 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 'cause we're building a nuclear reactor in your backyard." 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [34:11]: 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 gonna come out of that might not happen, right? We're gonna 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, uh, 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've gotten slapped down, right? So you have to, you have to look at the entire picture, and the goal is make the cheapest energy that we can.

**Isaiah Taylor** [34:55]: Um, and anything that falls under that scope, anything that blocks, you know, that pathway, is our responsibility to fix.

**Ti Morse** [35:02]: Yesterday, you were talking about this idea of most reactor companies are basically trying to design this beautiful thing that looks like a Ferrari.

**Isaiah Taylor** [35:11]: Yeah.

**Ti Morse** [35:12]: And you're trying to design the Toyota Camry-

**Isaiah Taylor** [35:14]: Yes

**Ti Morse** [35:14]: ... that Toyota just makes, like, a million of them a year.

**Isaiah Taylor** [35:16]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [35:17]: Why is that so important?

**Isaiah Taylor** [35:18]: 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 gonna make energy 10 times cheaper, and nuclear fission is the way to do that based on the physics. Uh, but if you look at the cost of nuclear, most of the cost is the plant itself, right? Uranium's very cheap. Operations are pretty cheap. It's actually the plant itself that costs the money. So you need to make the plant cheaper. And there's two philosophies on how you do that.

**Isaiah Taylor** [35:52]: 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 gonna be worth it, 'cause it's gonna make 1.2 gigawatts, right? That's, that's one philosophy. The other philosophy is actually the way that you make anything cheap is you make it in a factory. Factories are places where cheap things come out, right? They're ... Factories are, are buildings where things go to become free, right? Uh, you know, a- and, and so nuclear reactors need to go to factories become, to become free. Um, in a factory setting, you have the opportunity to continuously ask the question, "Why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? Why are we doing that?" Right?

**Isaiah Taylor** [36:35]: In a factory setting, you have the same group of smart people on the floor watching something happen, and you know, that 22-year-old kid, you know, straight out of college Who's never seen this factory line before, steps in, and, you know, this has happened before, and she's like, "Why do-- What's going-- Why do we do that?" And then, you know, the answer's like, "Ah, well, 'cause I-- Actually, I don't know. Why do we do that?" And then you chase that, that thread down, and you realize, we don't need to do this at all, right? If you are always doing traditional style plant construction, you don't learn those lessons. Because in the 10 years that it took you to build the thing, half those people retired, right? You don't even get to, to, to have those learnings. So the goal is to, to make nuclear reactors something that are repeatably built,

**Isaiah Taylor** [37:21]: and you could start to bring these costs down. You could vertically integrate, you can do things better than you did yesterday, and that mass manufacturing is eventually how we're gonna make things cheap. So once you've decided that that's what you're gonna do, well, how do you design the reactor? And the answer is that you should trade off everything for simplicity and safety. Um, I really believe that's the answer. Y-you can trade off efficiency, you can trade off power density, you can trade off some aspects of size, but you cannot trade off simplicity or safety, because those are the two things that are, are going to allow you to mass replicate.

**Isaiah Taylor** [37:55]: And the mass replication is fundamentally what will allow us to take nuclear from an industry that builds nuclear reactors for $7,000 a kilowatt to $15,000 a kilowatt, all the way down to a thousand, and then even below that.

**Ti Morse** [38:07]: Jeff Bezos has this awesome line where he compares, like, one-way doors versus two-way doors. One-way doors, you walk through it, and you can't walk back out.

**Isaiah Taylor** [38:13]: Yeah.

**Ti Morse** [38:13]: Two-way doors, you walk through, and you can walk back, and it's no, no problem.

**Isaiah Taylor** [38:17]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [38:17]: For the one-way door decisions that you're making, how do you kind of make those decisions and make sure that it doesn't completely fuck up your timelines and critical path?

**Isaiah Taylor** [38:25]: Yep. Um, this is something I've actually thought about for a long time. I, I guess I read that on social media, like, uh, eight or nine years ago when that was sort of going around as a, as a Bezos-ism, and I'm very grateful to him for it 'cause it's a really good framework. And the idea here is that you run as fast as you can through two-way doors, and you take your time and deliberate on, on one-way doors. Super useful framework for making decisions. The problem is, we also have to run really fast through the one-way doors. Like, the, like, we, we are at the place that we are at as a company because we have sprinted through some one-way doors. And, um, you know, there's a bit of, uh, like, instinct here and just, you know, make it work, um, that's, that's happened.

**Isaiah Taylor** [39:06]: I think a lot of it is you have to think all the way back to the fundamentals. Um, I think that people don't really read laws that much. Um, like, they don't really read laws and regulations, but you can read this stuff, right? Like, it's out there. Um, and, and actually, now there's, like, Claude, so you could even go faster with, you know, OpenAI and Claude and ChatGPT and these things. But even before that, you know, the laws were out there, and the regs were out there. You can go and read them. And there's a lot of stuff that you can just boil down to the fundamentals of, like, why can't we do this faster? And you read the regs, and it's like, well, actually, the regs say you can, or they don't say you can't. Um, but people just kind of haven't been. And, and actually, I'll say one, one big advantage that Valor has

**Isaiah Taylor** [39:50]: 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-

**Ti Morse** [40:08]: As someone that also risks a huge amount of capital with-

**Isaiah Taylor** [40:11]: 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 than that. When you're working on a problem like that, you're gonna have to take some big swings, and some of those swings are gonna be zero or one swings where, you know, if you spent $40 million 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,

**Isaiah Taylor** [40:55]: and especially if you want to build the most important things in the world. Like, if you want to actually change the nature of how humanity consumes energy, uh, and you can't get yourself over that level of decision-making and aren't ready to just absolutely barrel through a couple one-way doors, you, you know, I'm gonna go faster than you.

**Ti Morse** [41:13]: 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-

**Isaiah Taylor** [41:21]: Oh, yeah

**Ti Morse** [41:21]: ... when things don't work.

**Isaiah Taylor** [41:22]: Yes.

**Ti Morse** [41:23]: And so what are the best examples of you pulling rabbits out of a hat, um, and how do you actually do that?

**Isaiah Taylor** [41:29]: All right. So a lot of the, the rabbits that we've been able to pull out of hats, I obviously can't talk about. There's some amazing stories that we'll tell someday. But one that I, that I will talk about, just one small example, um, it was very important to us to demonstrate that we could move this reactor via C-17. Uh, we built it to be containerized. We built it under the weight specs of the maximum load of a C-17. Um, 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 went, you know, we spent a lot of time with the Department of War on the logistics of how that's gonna work.

**Isaiah Taylor** [42:08]: Um, 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? 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, i-if you, you know, snap an important component." Um, and we're like, "Yep, we know. Like, 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?

**Isaiah Taylor** [42:47]: And it's months of analysis, months of engineering, re-engineering on the plant, re-fabrication of things that weren't gonna take the G loads. You know, hundreds of people within the Department of War that coordinated that operation. And we get to Three days left until we fly, right? The Secretary of Energy's gonna be flying with us. The Under Secretary of War is gonna be flying with us. The CTO of the United States is gonna 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 gonna take off from, uh, and he says, "Guys, uh, the loader truck that is supposed to load your reactor onto the C-17,

**Isaiah Taylor** [43:29]: 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [44:05]: 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. So 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 st- took the existing- existing specs of the vessel and, um, started fabricating.

**Isaiah Taylor** [44:41]: And, uh, there's these specialty rollers that, uh, you know, have to get integrated into the surface, and they have to take a certain amount of load, and these are loaded onto s- to pallets, and you have to integrate with 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 and the motor, and how do we basically bridge that gap in, uh, in 24 hours? And literally 24 hours later, uh, we had fabricated, uh, a truck that we then used to load our nuclear reactor on a C-17. Um, probably one of the most ridiculous works of rapid engineering and fabrication in history, and literally, like, we were flying in these rollers.

**Isaiah Taylor** [45:24]: Like, you have to, like, we had to go buy these rollers, and you have to weld them into the line so that they could actually roll the, the pallets onto it, and, um, yeah, many, many all- all-nighters pulled throughout that process, and 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, a- and we have a team that is utterly relentless. Uh, 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's a big market. There's a l- there's a lot of room for all of us.

**Isaiah Taylor** [46:04]: But when I look at the relentlessness of our, of this team, um, it is incomparable, and, uh, it's the most exciting job in the world to work with them.

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

**Isaiah Taylor** [46:30]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [46:31]: When things go wrong and you, y- the timeline slips or you predict that it could slip-

**Isaiah Taylor** [46:35]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [46:35]: ... things don't go your way-

**Isaiah Taylor** [46:37]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [46:37]: ... what does going into wartime mode and war room look like?

**Isaiah Taylor** [46:41]: My chief of staff is laughing over here 'cause she knows what war l- 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. Um, I hate generalities. Uh, you know, peop- 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [47:24]: Uh, and if that takes you 30 seconds to give me a answer to a one-word question, that's okay. That's probably, like, one of the... Uh, it's not the only fireable offense, but it's one of the only fireable offenses of working with me, is, like, giving non-precise answers. 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 down to what the actual root truth is. I have a friend, uh, Josh Steinman, um, who actually today was, um, now you'll know when we're recording this, but, uh, today was appointed to the Department of, of War's, uh, Board of Technologists. I don't remember the exact acronym.

**Isaiah Taylor** [48:08]: Great guy, and, um, he likes to say, "Nothing in the world takes more than 15 minutes. It's just who's 15 minutes?" Awesome, awesome line. Um, and, uh, this is really true about, like, diagnosing, uh, 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 in 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [48:53]: Like, it is being willing to do unreasonable things. We have done some unreasonable things on this, on this site in the last couple of months.

**Ti Morse** [49:02]: What are the best examples?

**Isaiah Taylor** [49:03]: 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, 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 DOE- it didn't start as a DOE site, and so there's all these layers of complexity you have to come through. And a couple months ago, um, we realized that, um, you know, again, in, I think it was, like, in a stand-up, we, we started asking, like, "Okay, what's critical path to this? What's critical path to that?"

**Isaiah Taylor** [49:47]: 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, um, in order to stay on timeline. And so we called a war room. Uh, there is a, a trailer just over there. Uh, 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 chairs, set up a screen, and, um, call in everybody who is not working on

**Isaiah Taylor** [50:27]: 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." And the people who have no context on the plant, they're not gonna be am- be able to answer the technical questions, but they're gonna 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? Uh, can we find somebody who knows the answer to that question?" And, um, it was a, it was over a weekend.

**Isaiah Taylor** [51:05]: I, I made this call on, uh, I think it was a Friday morning, and, uh, the war room wrapped up on a Tuesday morning. Um, so yeah, it's, it's a maniacal search of truth, and then being willing to do unreasonable things to fix problems.

**Ti Morse** [51:20]: This morning, we were driving in your car, and I was kind of talking with you about, like, urgency and timelines and being maniacally urgent. And I really believe that if you look at someone like Elon, he's effectively this injector of urgency-

**Isaiah Taylor** [51:35]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [51:35]: ... in all of his companies. He, like, unfucks bottlenecks and injects ur- urgency.

**Isaiah Taylor** [51:39]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [51:40]: So with this sort of thing, how are you thinking about, like, injecting as much urgency as possible-

**Isaiah Taylor** [51:46]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [51:46]: ... in the right places?

**Isaiah Taylor** [51:47]: Yeah. Elon is, like, probably the greatest to ever do this, right? Uh, 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, um, he's able to just, like, show people that you can move faster. I think that's one of the most useful talents in the world and one of the most useful skills in the world. Um, because the fact is, if you boil down the work of any project in every company, if you could attack every single one of those tasks, right? Imagine 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [52:31]: 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 have been wa- you know, they've, they've loved nuclear for a long time. They think that nuclear is the right way to reindustrialize the United States. They think that it's the only way that we're going to, you know, be able to get cheap power back, uh, in the US.

**Isaiah Taylor** [53:14]: Uh, maybe they're doing it because they want to stop carbon emissions, uh, 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. This is one of the, I think, the least replicable and, um, hardest to change aspects of a company's culture. Um, you can fix many different things about a company culture. You can make the marketing better. Um, you can even increase the talent of the engineering team. You can fix your finances. You can make your FP&A processes better. But pace is, I think, one of the only things that you can't change about a company and...

**Isaiah Taylor** [53:57]: Or at least, let's say, that you can't improve about a company. Um, you can certainly make it worse. Um, you can take a high-paced company and make it slow. It's very, very hard to make a slow-moving company fast. Um, I would argue nine times out of 10, it's easier to start a whole new company than to try to take a slow-moving company and make it fast. So i- it's just, you know, it's something that we take extraordinarily seriously. Um, it's something that we hire for. It's a reason that people come to us.

**Ti Morse** [54:24]: Is there anything specific on the kind of company level that enables the team to be designed in a way where they can, you know, move-

**Isaiah Taylor** [54:32]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [54:32]: ... with extreme urgency, uh, and speed?

**Isaiah Taylor** [54:34]: Yeah. So one of these things, again, we, we have custom software for this actually that we've designed around giving the entire company visibility into what is the most important work at any given time. Uh, we have a screen up in our office that shows in big red letters what is the most important work in the company at any given time. Now, of course, all the work in, in the company is important, and this is, I think, one of w- one of the reasons that companies don't like talking about the critical path. They, they fear that if you're always talking about the critical path, then all the other work will, will get undone, and people won't think it's as important And, um, actually the critical path changes so much that, like, that's not a big deal because people will be like, "Okay, maybe I'm not critical path today, but I probably will be tomorrow because that team is gonna go fix that problem. They're gonna figure out how to move faster."

**Isaiah Taylor** [55:19]: So that's one big thing. Uh, the other thing is, like, we just culturally talk about it constantly. And, and I like to do this by thinking about the, the future state that I care about, right? I want Valor to be in a position where we are turning on nuclear reactors every hour, right? So I wanna turn on 24 reactors a day, and if I'm gonna 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [56:02]: 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 gonna be the circulation system and the pressure system, and the control rod drive units, so we should probably go get that system designed and in fabrication as fast as we possibly can. Oh, the machine shops in LA take too long to go and make these parts? Well, you better have a two-and-a-half million dollar machine shop standing there in a month, right? Okay, so there's the critical path to, you know, where we were, uh, about 18 months ago. Um, so, uh, yeah, and like a, a huge part of this is it really is cultural. Um, the whole, the whole team and the whole company has to think this way all the time. Uh, and it's very uncomfortable. It's weird to think this way.

**Isaiah Taylor** [56:46]: You wanna just think in, in your own box. You wanna think in waterfalls, um, but you have to think holistically. Everyone has to think about the whole company and what is going to make us move the fastest.

**Ti Morse** [56:57]: Initially, you were going to go to the Philippines-

**Isaiah Taylor** [56:59]: Yep

**Ti Morse** [56:59]: ... and build some reactor out there, and then suddenly Trump gets elected, bring nuclear back to America, um, and then at the same time, data centers absolutely start ripping-

**Isaiah Taylor** [57:09]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [57:09]: ... 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-

**Isaiah Taylor** [57:17]: Yep

**Ti Morse** [57:17]: ... in order to make sure that it was aligned?

**Isaiah Taylor** [57:19]: Yeah, I don't think we reset the North Star. The North Star is make energy 10 times cheaper. And, uh, the Philippines was originally the right place to go about that, um, and when these executive orders came out, the Department of Energy said, "You know, we're open for business, and we're gonna 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?

**Isaiah Taylor** [57:54]: 'Cause the North Star has always been we need to turn a reactor on, and we need hardware experience, and we need to get under pressure, and we need to get at temperature, and we need to be splitting atoms, and we need to be making shielding and doing nuclear construction and all of these things, and so what's the fastest way to do that? Uh, that's always been the plan. And so when the conditions on the ground change, uh, 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 gonna pivot in all sorts of unexpected ways for us right now, right? But we will continue relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10 times cheaper.

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

**Isaiah Taylor** [59:02]: I have come to, uh, gain massive, massive respect for, uh, amazing technology leaders and technologists, um, in this company. Um, it's not that, you know -- It, it's really just like you don't know what it's gonna feel like until you do it.

**Isaiah Taylor** [59:23]: And, uh, 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, uh, and to take the next step, like, I don't know, it just is, uh -- I hoped to see that, but actually seeing that in your team is one of the most rewarding feelings on Earth. I had a theory about, uh, how the, the nuclear industry was structured, but I wasn't sure yet.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:00:06]: Um, and now I'm, like, a lot more confident about it, which is that a lot of people in the nu- nuclear industry really do wanna go fast, and they just not have been-- They haven't been given the avenue to do that. I meet people in the nuclear industry all the time who, you know, look at what we're doing, uh, you know, with, with envy because they're like, "I've been working for 20 years in nuclear, and I haven't seen an advanced reactor turn on yet, right? I worked on this design, I worked on that design, I worked on this study, and you guys are about to turn one on," right? Um, and so I've learned that, yes, there are deep problems in how the nuclear industry is formatted, but, like, there are a huge amount of people who want to go fast. Um, and so, you know, that's, that's a powerful thing that we get to do, is, is unlock those people and let them run.

**Ti Morse** [1:00:50]: It's important to talk about safety and, like, why-- what makes reactors dangerous-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:00:56]: Yep

**Ti Morse** [1:00:56]: ... and also what makes, like, this sort of thing very safe.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:00:59]: Yeah.

**Ti Morse** [1:01:00]: Can you just talk about the, like, sizing and how everything works?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:01:03]: Yeah. So there's like- Let's break down what nuclear safety is and why. Fundamentally, nuclear safety is about making sure that the public and workers don't get dosed with radiation above acceptable thresholds. Everyone is always dosed with radiation all the time. You and I are currently getting dosed with radiation just because the sky 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, uh, the way that would happen in a nuclear reactor if you were not careful, is that when uranium splits, uh, it forms a variety of what we call daughter products.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:01:42]: Uh, so a uranium atom will break apart, and now you have fragments of what used to be a uranium atom and is now a bunch of other random atoms. And those re- those atoms, um, are radioactive. They produce gamma rays. Uh, and those gamma rays at enough dose, um, are harmful to your body and could kill you. So there's, there's the sort of, okay, gamma rays are coming from the reactor while it's running, and so you need to make sure that you stay a certain distance from it and that you shield those rays. And then there's the issue of, and really this is what nuclear safety comes down to, how do we make sure that those fission products stay inside the reactor where they are controlled, right?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:02:24]: So the ultimate, um, goal of nuclear safety is make sure that those fission products stay in a controlled state inside of the core. What you don't want is for those reactive, you know, those radioactive fission products to, you know, be distributed into the air or into the water or into the next, you know, the field next door. How do you do that? Well, there's sort of two ways that, um, 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 cause two more fissions.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:03:09]: 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. Now, the, the danger is that an exponential growth function is exponential, and so you need that curve to taper, right? You need to get up to a certain rate of fission and, 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, uh, has many factors. There are lots of different ways to control, uh, the rate of reactivity.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:03:51]: But in traditional, uh, nuclear power plants, the control rods are the main way to control reactivity. I, I hesitate to, to talk negatively about the traditional nuclear industry because the fact is, traditional nuclear is the safest form of energy on Earth. Even with all of the flaws I'm about to describe, it is still the safest energy on Earth. But, um, 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, uh, 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:04:34]: 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, uh, in U-238 to, to moderate that. Um, but it's still, you know, a s- a, a piece of engineering that you have to treat very carefully and get right. 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, uh, maintains a reactivity level that is not going to result in, uh, in, uh, in a runaway reaction or in meltdown is actually through the inherent physics of the plant itself.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:05:16]: And how that works is that as uranium-238 heats up, um... The 238, by the way, is the non-fissile isotope of uranium. So there's 235 and 238, and 238 is the one that doesn't split, and there's always a bunch of 238 in every reactor. This is f- this is what uranium enrichment is. You enrich up to a certain percent, but not all of it. And as uranium-238 heats up, um, 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:06:01]: And so, um, when you have this growth of, of neutron flux and you have this growth of heat, that heat rapidly gets spread out, and you have this moderating effect and 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:06:41]: But if the control rods broke for whatever reason and got frozen, and you know, they're gravity-fed, so, you know, if the plant turns off or loses power, they'll just drop into the core. But let's say for some crazy reason, the control rods get stuck up. That is not going to lead to a runaway event. So that's the first aspect of nuclear safety. The second aspect of nuclear s- safety is meltdown. So most people don't know this, but meltdown is actually something that generally happens after a reactor has been turned off, so it's a post-shutdown meltdown. This is what happened in Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Um, a meltdown is when you've already turned the reactor off, the rods are down, but there's still heat being produced in the core.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:07:23]: Um, and that's because after uranium splits, you still have recently split daughter products back to these fission products, um, that are unstable isotopes of various atoms, and they are themselves still decaying into other things, and they produce heat when they do that. And so after you turn a reactor off, you still have about 7% of the active produc- 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 ex- an unacceptable level, you have to keep running the cooling loop.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:08:03]: Uh, so in a normal nuclear reactor, after shutdown, you actually keep running the pumps, and you keep pulling that heat out for about 24 hours after shutdown. And that's the condition of failure that leads to what we call nuclear meltdown. When those pumps fail, for instance, in Fukushima, uh, the backup generators were flooded from a s- a, a tsunami, right? Um, 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 in the core, and you have, um, any number of things happen, including the pressure boundary, uh, can get, um, uh, breached due to high temperatures, and you can have steam escape that's radioactive and, and all these sorts of things. So how do we avoid that?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:08:48]: Well, when I said at the beginning that this plant is 100 times safer than an existing nuclear power plant, what I mean is we already talked about thermal runaway, right? So this has a s- very strongly negative, uh, 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:09:29]: And it turns out that most of the decay heat is actually just going to get absorbed in getting the graphite hotter because it takes a huge amount of energy to heat graphite up. 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 3,000 degrees Celsius, so it can get extraordinarily hot. Um, the other important aspect to this is that we use a fuel called TRISO. So TRISO, um, is a, a, a particular fuel that can get extremely hot without compromising itself.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:10:06]: So normal nuclear fuel can't get that hot before it starts to crack and leak and, and eventually burst, and you have fission products leaking around inside of the reactor. TRISO can get very, very hot, uh, before it gets, uh, compromised, over 2,000 degrees. Um, and so the combination of these things means in a shutdown scenario, the core can just get really hot, and that's actually just f- fine. That's okay. And, um, a lot of decay heat is taken care of by just allowing the core to heat up. 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:10:47]: Um, as a cylinder gets bigger, the walls of a cylinder, the surface area of a cylinder scales with the square, whereas the volume of a 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, the heat from the decay products just escape through the walls of the vessel passively, right? They just get convected and radiated from the walls of the vessel. Um, and the combination of all of these three factors means if we were to have a circulator shut off of our reactor, exactly like Fukushima, um, what would happen is that the core would slowly heat up,

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:11:31]: heat would start escaping out the sides of the vessel, it would get to an equilibrium temperature, which is below the temperatures at which nuclear fuel would be compromised or the graphite would be compromised, and then it would start to taper off. And what's awesome about Valor is that that statement is not a theoretical statement. That is something that we've tested in real life. We had this exact reactor built exactly as it is in Los Angeles. We even built a fake building around the vessel to mimic this, uh, nuclear shielding, 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, uh, we actually have a video of this. We turned off all safety systems. We just shut everything off.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:12:16]: 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, uh, heat being slowly, passively removed from the vessel walls, and then over about a two-day period, the heat, the temperature fell again. Um, so really what all of this leads to is that when we talk about nuclear safety in the, in the terms of the plants that Valatomics builds, it's not engineering safety, it's physics safety, right? The safety of our plant comes from physics.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:12:55]: It comes from the basic choices that we've made in the physics and materials and geometry of our plants, not whether or not a single pump works or a single valve works, or does it get flooded or any of these things.

**Ti Morse** [1:13:05]: So there's this amazing chart that I absolutely love looking at, which is basically the launch cadence over time.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:11]: Yes.

**Ti Morse** [1:13:11]: And you see effectively all of these different countries competing, and the US kinda like tapers off in the early 2000s-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:17]: Yep

**Ti Morse** [1:13:17]: ... and we stop launching. And then suddenly you have SpaceX, and they invert this entire graph, and suddenly like 95% of all launches or something globally-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:26]: Yep

**Ti Morse** [1:13:26]: ... are just SpaceX launches.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:27]: Yeah.

**Ti Morse** [1:13:28]: 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:37]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [1:13:37]: There's like two getting built in the US.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:39]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [1:13:40]: Except for maybe there's three now.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:41]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [1:13:41]: 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-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:48]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [1:13:49]: ... for launches?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:13:50]: It's so important that people understand that these things are possible in technology, right? And I, that, 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 asked people in the early 2000s, if you showed people that graph beforehand, they'd be just like, "No. Science fiction."

**Ti Morse** [1:14:16]: There's no way that's happening.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:14:16]: 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, and, uh, that is exactly what we are trying to do here. And it, it flows into really every choice that, that Valor has made. Um, you know, I, I like to say if you poke Valor in any place, you prick us in any place, uh, we'll bleed scale. Uh, we have meticulously, ruthlessly engineered everything we're doing for maximum scale. And it actually goes back to the safety thing. Like you could argue that you don't really need to make a plant this safe. One of the biggest criticisms that we get

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:15:00]: is for using TRISO, um, because people are like, "TRISO's super expensive." And I'm like, "Well, one, we're gonna make it cheap, so that's fine." But you know, uh, like we, it's, it's expensive 'cause 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, I don't think that's a big problem. But a, um, deeper and more fundamental point is like if you're serious about scaling nuclear to the inflectionary degree that, that we believe is possible, your plants really should be unbelievably safe. Like,

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:15:36]: it's just gonna 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 of these things, uh, that, 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. 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, 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:16:20]: 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 by July 4th." And they're like, "Maybe?" Like, "Uh, we'll see." Um, and hey, you know, we're, we're a month and a half out. We've 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, and then you watch it happen. But in that suspension of disbelief and in these beliefs of being able to build tens of thousands, you have to make real trade-offs for that outcome, right? And a good example of that is, uh, TRISO. Another good example of that is using a low power density format reactor, right? An HTGR is not a high powered density reactor.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:17:05]: Um, but it's so simple that we can build thousands of them, and I believe that building thousands is essentially the only thing that will matter, right? Um, that and pace, right? Doing it fast and doing it many times is, is in the long term, and by long term I mean 5 to 10 years, the only thing that will matter. Um, and in order to do that, you have to have some simplicity, and you have to have safety, which leads you to a high temperature gas reactor. It leads you to pure graphite, uh, TRISO fuel, helium coolant, um, and 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:17:48]: Like, it's just hard for us to imagine something going from zero to one to 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000 to a million, and, um, I just think about the million a lot. Like it, it's just something that like keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning. I want to get to the millionth reactor very badly.

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

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:18:15]: I have a very high tolerance for looking dumb. Uh, that's one of my secret weapons is like I am perfectly fine looking like an idiot, and, uh, I've done it a lot. I've had a good amount of practice looking like an idiot. Some of those times were because I was, and a lot of those times were because, you know, I was right, and it took a while for people to realize it. 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:18:58]: 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. Um, and I have, I've had to like come to terms with specific moments like that, um, over the last, h- honestly, seven years of building different companies. But, um- It's painful. Like, people don't like it. People really, really hate looking dumb. And, uh, I kind of embrace it. I kinda 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:19:42]: It's like a crazy unlock that, like, gives you access to the root truth of the world because no one else is willing to look dumb enough to, to go find out.

**Ti Morse** [1:19:50]: On the, like, hit pieces point-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:19:52]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [1:19:52]: ... did you learn anything from Palmer?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:19:54]: I have always appreciated Palmer for, um, not letting, like... Not letting it slide, right? Like, he is, you know, he's actually a very warlike person. He's a very nice person, but he's, he's, like, always at war with, like, somebody, uh... But, like, that's the, the nature of reality is, like, every CEO is at war. They're just, like, a lot of CEOs are, like, kind of in denial that they're at war. They wanna try to, like, think about something else, so they wanna go to the beach or whatever. And, um, yeah, like, I- that's something that I very much, very much appreciate, uh, about Palmer.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:20:25]: And, um, you know, actually shout out to, 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, i- in the early days, where people were saying, "This guy's a high school dropout," like, "What is he doing? You can't do this without a nuclear PhD." Um, so yeah, I, I will always be, uh, very appreciative of that.

**Ti Morse** [1:20:56]: 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-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:21:05]: Yes

**Ti Morse** [1:21:05]: ... to make sure that basically, like, all these different things come together to achieve the critical path at some point-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:21:11]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [1:21:11]: ... down the line.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:21:12]: Yeah.

**Ti Morse** [1:21:12]: So how do you kind of think about parallel pathing and structuring that the best?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:21:17]: Things have, like, a certain amount of inevitable time. Like, there, 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 gonna melt the metal, and you're gonna get a different phase than you want. Um, and if, you know, it's... If you think of the, the heat will penetrate faster, um, you know, you're actually just gonna, like, mess with the phase on the surface. So, like, there, there's a certain amount of soak time for a metal part that is inescapable until... You know, now that I say that out loud, I guess maybe there's, like, ways that you could use, like, electromagnetism or something to heat it up. Actually, someone should think about that. Could you just, like, microwave

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:22:03]: parts to heat treat? Anyway, this is a distraction. Um, maybe someone's already doing that. I'll bet someone's already doing that. Uh, but the point is, there are, like, irreducible time, you know? There, there are ir- irreducible timeframes to, to some things. And, um, I think one big mistake that companies make is, like, you have to stay focused, but also you have to start the clock on some really important things. And a super good example of that is where we are right now. Um, one of the really unique things about 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. Uh, this is not a national lab where we are here. And I love the national labs, and they have done insane work, and the history there, I mean... Uh, actually my, my grandmother was born in a national lab, literally. Uh, my grandmother was born in Oak Ridge.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:22:48]: So I, I, like, I have a deep affection for them. But if we were to go try to turn this plant on, uh, in a national lab, that would be a crutch, right? And I know that as a company that needs to scale and wants to make thousands of these, we have to go and learn how to take a patch of dirt and turn it into a nuclear site. And if we did that in a lab, we wouldn't learn that, right? And there's just, there's irreducible clock time, right? I think one of the big things that people don't understand is there's two different types of time. There's, like, normal time, and there's clock time, right? And clock time stops for no man, right? Clock time keeps ticking, no matter if you're Elon Musk or you're, you know, a dude on the street, right? Clock time just keeps ticking. So clock time is the

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:23:34]: most valuable and most difficult asset. There's other types of time, right? Like, an engineer hour is, like, a fungible type of time, or you just hire 10 more engineers, and now you have 10 times the time, right? But clock time is not like that. And, um, you know, we have to start the clock ticking on really, really important things as soon as you can. Now, you can go overboard with this and start some clocks that you weren't ready for yet and distract yourselves and lose focus and fail. That's very possible. So there's an art to that. Um, and I think Valor has stepped out and, you know, honestly, we're ticking on a lot of clocks that people thought were impossible.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:24:09]: Um, we are, you know, halfway through a lot of clocks that we literally were told was not physically possible, and by experts, by industry experts, by names that you would know. Um, that, you know, later this year they're gonna see those, those clocks, uh, resolve in our favor. So, um, yeah, y- 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 ir, uh, an irreducible clock time problem, you can't throw money at it. Uh, this is one big mistake that the nuclear industry's been making for, you know, a decade and a half. And one thing that, that was very surprising to me is that when we started the company, we had 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."

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:24:54]: I'm like, "Well, listen, like, I know people with billions of dollars in this industry who aren't doing anything." So money is actually not really the, the primary thing in this, in this game. Like, there's something else. There are other factors than just how much cash you have in the bank, and it turns out that that was, that was true. So yeah, clock time and, and the irreducibility of certain problems forces you into parallelism, and it forces you to take, again, capital risk and time risk and people risk and all these things. But, um, fundamentally, that's what's going to allow you to, to win.

**Ti Morse** [1:25:27]: When I think of the things that- ... scare me the most, it's always the things that I just can't predict will be problems, and then they end up being problems. They're effectively, like, unknown bottlenecks-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:25:38]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [1:25:38]: ... uh, unpredictability. How are you trying to think forward, I don't know, a year or two years, may- 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 deadline's next week, and you just didn't even realize that it was a problem until now?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:25:57]: Yeah. So the most fundamental answer here is that we keep the overall pace of the organization very high, right? Because if you have a, 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, there's decisions made in this plant, in this room, that look weird until you think about like, well yeah, we're trying to do that a million times. Like, and, and this, obviously this plant is not ready for that.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:26:40]: 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. Um, and so yeah, you, you have to think backwards from, like, what needs to be true for this, for this to, to take place. And, and then the other thing is, like, you have to have a certain amount of paranoia. Like, I have a hard time going to sleep at night thinking about all the different possible bottlenecks that might present, and like, that's the downside to being a founder. Like, you just- you're gonna have to do that.

**Ti Morse** [1:27:07]: When we were walking through, you said, you know, for this one, we are gonna have all the wires underneath the floor-

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:27:12]: Yeah

**Ti Morse** [1:27:13]: ... but 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.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:27:18]: Yep.

**Ti Morse** [1:27:19]: What all, like, learnings have you, have you gotten from this initial facility?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:27:22]: Yeah. I mean, we've had thousands of, 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 gonna do it again. There are not too many things that I can say specifically here yet, um, because they are really, really valuable, honestly.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:28:01]: Like, these, these lessons, these like, painful lessons we've learned, like, are, are remote, and they're the value of the company.

**Ti Morse** [1:28:08]: Let's say everything works, and you're ready to scale to a giga site, and you're putting like, 1,000 of these things on a little plot of land.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:28:14]: Yeah.

**Ti Morse** [1:28:15]: How do you actually do that? What does that look like?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:28:17]: Yeah. I actually don't think it works that way, by the way.

**Ti Morse** [1:28:19]: Okay.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:28:19]: Like, what you're saying where 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 it on. It's gonna make power. We're about, we're gonna do it again, we're gonna do it again, we're gonna do it again. And the tick rate of the organization will get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And soon the t- 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, building millions of reactors. So, you know, I feel like I've, I've spent a long time talking about other people's mistakes.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:28:59]: 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 that 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.

**Ti Morse** [1:29:44]: Let's end it on what does July 4th of this year signify?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:29:48]: 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 EO 14301. 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, uh, over the last 20 years in startups and other companies who have designed much better plants than this.

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:30:31]: 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. Um, one reactor splitting atoms, making a small amount of power, making gamma rays that we actually had to deal with the reality of, of, is, uh, infinitely more meaningful to us. So I think the meaning of, of what's gonna happen on July 4th is we're gonna-- the United States is gonna be back in the business of doing that, right?

**Isaiah Taylor** [1:31:12]: Not just my company, um, you know, others who are, who are working on zero power criticalities, which are also important, um, like the one we did back in November. These, these are important steps. We're gonna be back in, in the, 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 gonna need to do all of the things that we care about as a country and to make energy as cheap as we possibly can.