Valar Atomics becomes first nuclear startup to generate electricity, smashing its July 4 deadline

Have a good one. Let me talk about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowdstrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Isaiah Taylor. Third, fourth, fifth time on the show. We're very excited to have Isaiah back on the show. How are you doing, Isaiah? Good to see you.

Doing great. How's it going, John? Jory. It's been a little bit.

It has been too long, but you have big news. You've been cooking. Break it down for us. What's the latest and greatest with AR atomics? I don't think you can be holding the gong right there, Jordy. There's no fundraising yet. We're just uh we're turning reactors on. So, this is not the best reason ever. Anybody will give you money. Come on. I guess I have All right. All right. Let's go.

What happened? What's the latest

Oh man, we uh we had a really fun day yesterday here on the site right now. Not screen. This is the W 250 reactor. Yeah.

Uh our first power reactor. And yesterday we made electricity for the first time. We became the first nuclear startup to ever make electricity

and we did it with Nvidia. We powered an NVIDIA Spark. It was a lot of fun.

That's remarkable.

Big milestone.

So reset for us. I mean, you're not here announcing fundraising, but how big is the team? Have you outgrown Elsa Gundo yet? Where are you going next? Are you expanding to Utah? Break it all down for us.

We have outgrown outgrown Little Gundo, unfortunately. But uh I mean this is this is the way of of all great startups, right? SpaceX started in Elsa Gundo and then they moved out to Hawthorne. We did the same thing. Our current facility is a couple miles south of the Hawthorne uh SpaceX facility there. Um we're also here in Utah. This site that I'm on right now is Valor Atomics at San Rafll out in the Utah desert in uh in beautiful Emer County.

Cool. And so what is the pitch to the AI industry? How big can you go? How fast? How parallelized do you want to be? What is the product that you're selling beyond just electricity?

Yeah, I think speed, right? Speed and scale is is really what we're selling. Um, we believe that nuclear has some fundamental scaling advantages over something like gas. And the climate impact is a big part, right? Everyone wants to figure out how we can scale AI without a huge climate impact, but that's only one portion of it. The other problem with gas generation is it has really backed up turbines and it also has nack gas infrastructure that has to scale along with it, right? And we're kind of running out of places where you can just plop down a turbine without having to go and lay pipeline. So what we're doing here is with uranium, you have one truckload that delivers an entire year's worth of fuel, right? And that gives you a lot more flexibility on where you build the reactors, on how big you can scale those sites. And so nuclear has this fundamental advantage we believe in in scale. Now there's a lot of technological maturity built up in uh natural gas. And so that's where we need to go and catch up. So I think right now where Valor is, we just turned on our first reactor. I would put this at like you know Falcon 1 days, right? We just launched a rocket and now we go go build a better one and start scaling that. So that's kind of where we are. But you know I think these things can happen faster than you might think.

Talk about the the timeline that you guys were were working around. Uh, it was pretty ambitious when it was set at some point last year, I believe.

Yeah. So, May of last year. Yeah. May of last year, the executive orders were signed. I came on the day that the executive orders were signed and we said, "We're going to uh we're going to build a nuclear reactor and turn it on by July 4th, right here on this site. At the time, the site was a patch of grass."

Yeah.

And uh July 4th was the deadline. Look, Valor hit it out of the park. Uh there's a lot of awesome companies in that pilot program, but if you actually look at the EO, uh Valor just absolutely smashed it. I mean, we didn't just go critical, we went critical twice and we went to thermal power operations and we went to electricity production and we did it outside of the National Labs. Um so we we really just hit it out of the park in every every dimension and I'm incredibly excited and proud of the Valor team.

So you're moving very quickly. You're outside of the National Labs. uh what does integration with the national labs with regulators with approvals for designs uh what is the state of uh that obviously the government's moving faster here but are there still approvals that you're looking forward to uh hitting in terms of milestones

yeah and look you know we love the national labs we actually did go critical inside the national labs back in November in the novaore but you have to graduate from that right you have to learn how to take a bare patch of dirt that's not you know licensed nuclear and get it ready to to go nuclear. So that's kind of step two, right? Step three would be the NRC, a commercial regulator. But these things are really driven by team experience, right? They're they're driven by experience, by good engineering, by test data. And that's really what we focus on, and it's why we've gone to power in this plant. When we go to the NRC, we're going to go to the NRC with a lot of data behind us, empirical test data that we've gathered right here on this unit.

Talk to us about Whoa. What's that? We've uh we've we've played with these microphones to figure out how we can not get the background noise, but uh yeah, that's like it. It's real. Um talk about uh uh community engagement when you're uh proposing building a nuclear reactor. I I recently saw a crazy stat that uh that the average American when pled, there was some, you know, Pew Research study that said, "I'd rather have a nuclear reactor in my backyard than a data center. you're going to be doing both.

Says, "How about both?

How about both?" But but I imagine that you have more reps in in terms of community engagement, in terms of messaging and communication than some of the data center builders. They were like, "Look, we've been building, you know, the the the building that holds your Netflix categor catalog for decades with zero push back. Now all of a sudden, we're getting an immense amount of push back." You had push back on day one. You were born in it. you you know people have been pushing back against nuclear for decades molded by it. So what what are you saying if you go if you wind up in a random town about why it's a good it's good to have velar in town. Yeah, I mean it's such an interesting inversion, right? Suddenly people are looking at us as the nuclear industry trying to figure out how do we do community engagement? Well, that's really not what you would expected a couple years ago. And I would say that Valor has really taken community engagement just an order of magnitude more seriously than any other nuclear company so far. And it's because again we care about scale. We're not going to be able to do you know what we want to do at the scale we want to do it if we don't start right with the community. So, one of the big things that we do is when we come into a community, we don't come in after the project and say, "Oh, here's how you get to know us cuz we're in your backyard now." We actually go to the the community first, community leader, city council, county commissioners, and we say, "Here are the cost benefits, right? Here's what we think is awesome about it. Here are the potential trade-offs. What do you think?" And we try to get people to engage with it a lot before we go and actually do something. That's what we did here, and it's it's paid off really well. We talk to members of the community all the time. We host events. We host barbecues and you know people are really excited to have us here. What's really interesting about this is exactly like you said if you look at the surveys on nuclear versus data centers interestingly people are cool with the data center as long as you build a nuclear power plant first right but they want to make sure that there's power there which honestly makes sense. I don't think people are wrong about that. So we're really excited to engage

uh it's very noisy. People are worried about data center noise. what are you doing to go down the list? Because I'm sure on day one it was like just make sure it doesn't explode. But now communities have a number of requests. They want it to not be an eyesore. They don't want it to be noisy. They don't want it to shake the ground. They don't want the data center to emit EMF or anything else. H uh how many different check boxes are you trying to check with your development plans? Yeah, look, I think one of the big things that people miss about where data centers are placed is that they are being placed where there is gas, right? They have to burn gas and they have to spin turbines. And so you have these weird placements of data centers where look, we could put a data center anywhere you have fiber, but they don't want to have to go build new gas infrastructure. So we see a huge opportunity here to scale gas uh sorry to scale data centers out where look we're 100 250 ft from uh you know another industrial plant that's down the road but we're a mile from people who are trying to sit in their backyard and don't want to hear a noisy cooling fan and nuclear allows you to do that right because we're a little bit agnostic uh about where we put the reactor we can ship uranium anywhere so we think that's a big advantage for us

I love it congratulations thank you so much for coming on the show

incredible progress Incredible progress and can't wait to talk to you soon. Have a good one.

Have a great one. Cheers.

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