#219 Isaiah Taylor - CEO of Valar Atomics

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Isaiah Taylor, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's an honor to be here in this incredibly inspiring room.

Lots of mementos in here that are sick.

So, yeah, I'm excited to talk to you.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah,

so I guess in the past six months, we have really dove into the tech space.

And so we got connected through our mutual friend, Augustus Dorico, in The Rainmaker.

And when he was here, he was telling me all about what you were doing and that you guys were best friends.

And I've been really interested in the power grid for a couple of years now.

It seems very weak.

And

there's a lot of work to do.

Yeah.

And I think, who was, I think it was Scott Nolan that told me with

the data centers and AI and everything that by 2030, AI will be using the exact, the equivalent of the energy that we all use today in 17 years.

So all of our energy grid will be sucked up by 2030.

I think it's either all the energy grid will be sucked up by 2030 or we'll fall behind, right?

We'll fall behind on AI, which I think is unacceptable, right?

So this is a red-hot screaming problem that has to be solved.

It's a national security issue.

So I think if you're working in energy, you're working on something really important.

So you're building basic, is it mini nuclear reactors?

That's right.

So small modular reactors, the technical term, there's sort of three categories.

Micro reactors are 0 to 20 megawatts.

SMR, small modular reactors are 20 to about 300.

And then above 300, you're just sort of the classic gigawatt scale large reactors.

So we're kind of in the lower range of SMRs.

Our first commercial unit will be around 25 megawatts electric.

What does that mean?

For somebody like me, that means nothing.

So yeah, it's a good question.

So a 25 megawatt electric unit will power a small town.

So if you want to do, you know, if you want want to power a big town, you put several of them next to each other.

And this is a common strategy for nuclear.

Pretty much every nuclear site doesn't have just one nuclear unit on it, has several.

But we sort of take that to the logical conclusion and we say, we don't just build, normally it's like four, right?

So you have a site and you put like four units on it.

We want to have a site and put hundreds of units on it eventually.

To start off with, if you want to make a gigawatt, you know, put 40 down, right?

So 40 units next to each other at 25 megawatt electric nameplate is a gigawatt of power.

Now you're powering like a big city, right?

Or you're powering several towns, several cities, a significant portion of the grid.

And when we look at AI demand, we're looking at demand for data centers as large as a gigawatt, which has never happened before.

This is like a brand new idea of doing a data center that large.

And so we're super excited about it.

Wow.

What is a small town?

Give me a population size.

Yeah, so I think, you know, that's probably going to, a 25 megawatt electric unit is going to be a town of probably like 15,000 people.

Okay.

Yeah.

And one could power that entire town.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

You know, just at breakfast this morning, I mean, just,

I love stories like this.

You know, we weren't going to talk about your life story.

We were just going to go nuclear.

But I just, man, just kudos to you.

26 years old, dropped out of high school at 16, came from nothing.

Building, sounds like you had a great family that you're very close with, but not a.

I guess what I'm getting at is you didn't have a big trust fund or anything like that to get started.

You did it on your own.

And

you are a hell of an innovator.

Well,

I didn't do it on my own, but I certainly didn't do it with a trust fund.

You know, my parents are extremely supportive in

just always being there for me.

You know, I talk to my dad, you know, basically every week on the phone.

We talk for a couple hours, and

he's always just believed that

I have what's necessary to fix large problems.

I'm not sure where he got that idea, but he has always believed that.

And so I'm extremely grateful to him.

And then I've been helped by many other people, right?

You know, our investors at Valor couldn't do it without them.

My team members at Valor couldn't do it without them.

You know, previous companies that have started and employees there.

So, you know,

I'm standing on many, many shoulders at this point.

Not so much financially, but from other people.

But yeah, I grew up very poor.

We grew up on food stamps most of growing up

in various rough places around the country.

And it was really just that my parents were,

you know, my dad was

doing his best to provide for his family with the hand he had been dealt and was extremely focused on us, on his kids.

I like to say that my dad

will prove to have been one of the greatest investors in history.

Wow.

Not because he invested money into a stock, but because he invested in his children.

And I do hope that Valoratomics will be one of the most valuable country, one of the most valuable companies of all time.

And my dad invested in me to be able to do that in terms of educating us and giving us work ethic, especially giving us opportunities to get our hands dirty.

Well, it sounds like you're well on your way.

So

congratulations.

Thank you.

But everybody starts off with an introduction here.

So here we go.

Isaiah Taylor, visionary behind Valor Atomics, an El Segundo-based startup on a mission to reinvent atomic energy and fuel the future of mankind.

A 26-year-old self-taught innovator who dropped dropped out of high school at age 16 to start a business and write software for the world's largest hedge fund.

A fierce advocate for nuclear renaissance, challenging outdated regulations and pushing for innovation to power AI industry and beyond.

Have a radical plan for mass-producing small modular nuclear reactors to create carbon-neutral jet fuel and gasoline that is cheaper than drilling for oil.

In just one year, Valor Atomics has built a 100,000-pound prototype reactor, the first step on their journey to making civilization beautiful, again, with abundant energy.

A Midwesterner with Christian roots, your great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, giving you a personal connection to the atomic age.

Wow.

Yeah, we can talk about Westminster too.

Westminster Confession of Faith, if that's what we were getting at, is also great.

But no, Midwesterner, that's right.

Yeah.

But so a couple of things to get through.

One, One,

I have a Patreon account.

It's a community.

It's a subscription account.

And they've been here with me since the beginning.

And so one of the things I do is I offer them each and every guest that comes on, they get to ask a question.

And so this is from Ian Lane.

Coming from a non-traditional path in a legacy tied to the Manhattan Project, How do you reconcile the historic weight of nuclear innovation with your vision of making it scalable, clean, and decentralized?

And what's the biggest misconception people still have about nuclear energy today?

So I think the first half of the question, and thank you for the question, Ian, right?

And thank you for supporting Sean.

That's awesome.

So I think the first half of the question is like, how do you go from a heavy centralized industry to smaller, more mass manufactured, lighter?

type it type of industry.

And then what was the second half of the question there?

And what's the biggest misconception people still have about nuclear energy today?

Yeah, so the first half is like, how do you go from this really big thing to this small thing?

I would point out that this is something that's happened before in other industries.

And the way that you do it is you start small and you move very, very quickly and learn as fast as you can with talented people.

So I think SpaceX is the great example here.

So the space industry before SpaceX was really concentrated around these very large rockets that were very expensive to build, took a long time to build, did not launch very frequently.

And when SpaceX set out to create what they've created now, they started much smaller, right?

They created the Falcon 1.

Falcon 1 was a tiny rocket.

It was really too small to make any sense or be economical, but it taught them how to build rockets from scratch, right?

And it gave them a test platform to test their construction methods and their engineering and their motors and these sorts of things.

And then they got into the Falcon 9 and now they're building Starship.

So I think that we're going to follow a very similar track here where over time, I believe our reactors will slowly get larger.

But the first thing to do is you have to make sort of a minimum viable thing that your team can build and can build quickly and learn lessons, right?

It's all about learning.

We really are having to reinvent nuclear.

We can't just take the designs that we had in the 1960s.

Those designs don't work anymore for a few reasons.

It's not that they technologically don't work.

It's that they economically don't work.

So we don't have the tool chains and the labor to do massive engineering projects and massive construction projects anymore.

This is something we were really, really good at in the 50s and 60s.

As a country, as a civilization, we were great at building large civil infrastructure.

And over time, we sort of got worse at that.

We can talk about why, but the fact is we got worse at that and we got better at manufacturing, right?

So if you're going to bring nuclear back today, I believe that the form factor of your reactor should be reflective of that change, where you're going toward more of smaller manufactured things rather than these like really big civil works projects.

So the short answer is like, you start small and you move quickly and you learn fast with smart people.

And that's exactly what we're doing.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Interesting.

One more thing.

Everybody gets a gift.

Nothing crazy.

Vigilance leak gummy bears, legal in all 50 states.

Not that you have to worry about that living in LA.

I was going to say, legal in all 50 states.

That makes it sound like it maybe shouldn't have been legal, but

are these like CBD or something like that?

No, man, they're just

gummy bears.

Nice, but regular gummy bears up in the USA.

Let's go.

All right.

I'm looking forward to that.

Some of the best junk food around.

My kids are going to enjoy that as well.

I have a gift for you.

I have two gifts for you.

So I have two hats, which both say Make Nuclear Great Again, and this one still has a sticker on it.

So I'm going to take the sticker off.

Make nuclear great again.

We have a black one and a white one.

Nice.

And both of them are for you.

We're past Memorial Day, and the president has started wearing his white Make America Great Again hat.

So I made a white Make Nuclear Great Again hat.

Nice.

But both of these are for you.

Thank you.

Here you go.

You're going to have to sign this white one.

Let's do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

I was going to say great hat.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, now it's yours.

Thank you.

But yeah, you know, like I said at breakfast, you were kind of talking about, you know, how you met your wife and how you grew up.

And so I want to cover that stuff because I just, you know, you met your,

not to get ahead of myself here, but you met your wife in first grade.

I think

that that's awesome, man.

So let's start with your life story.

Where did you grow up?

So I grew up around the Midwest.

I was born in normal, Illinois, and my life has been very normal since then.

So that tracks.

And moved around the Midwest.

Moved to Colorado when I was, I believe, around six.

And that's when I met Sophie.

So Sophie and my wife we met in first grade we're in school together I don't know that we said many words to each other in in first grade she was very shy but I thought she was cute

and so we got to you know know each other the next few years went to church together and we were really just sort of a common denominator in each other's lives both of us moved all over the country many times for various reasons but we kept running into each other

you know, at various places and reunions and these sorts of things.

And I just had a huge crush on her since forever.

um, but she is, uh, she is amazing.

She's, I mean, it's like ridiculous to even like try to put words to that.

Um, but I've always, I've always known I wanted to marry her, uh, and I did.

So that's amazing.

That's amazing.

And you said, did you say you moved 14 times before you were 16?

Yeah.

That's a lot of moving around.

Yeah, we did a lot of moving around.

Yeah.

Why did you move around so much?

You know, it was, it was essentially my dad working very, very hard to find whatever work he could to provide for us.

Essentially, every move was,

you know,

a way to keep providing for the family.

So it gave me a really interesting perspective on the United States.

I've seen a lot of different parts of the United States and the Midwest and the American West and really fell deeply in love with this country and its people.

And so that's really motivated a lot of my life.

And you guys were on food stamps.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, we grew up quite poor and,

you know, grew up in neighborhoods where our car was stolen.

We'd come home from church and there's people getting arrested on our front lawn and um and surprisingly you know you'd think that that would cause my parents to like you know try to keep us insulated and uh like inside but but actually like we explored all around you know you know friends with all the all the neighbors that sort of thing um and watching very very different lifestyles from ours you know i was like friends with the guy who stole our car um and you know

and and i think like the fact that we were friends gave him some access to be able to steal the car and like you know we forgave him and got the car back and whatever.

But

yeah, like it was a, it was a very dynamic childhood that exposed me to probably a lot of risk and learned how to take proper amounts of risk and how to not get myself into dangerous situations, how to get myself out of dangerous situations, that sort of thing.

So it gave me a very unique perspective.

It also taught me to work extraordinarily hard.

My dad has worked unbelievably hard every single day of his life that I've ever known him.

And I've always just deeply admired that.

What does he do?

So he's done a bunch of different things,

really just whatever he could find to do.

And

he worked in marketing for a while.

He worked in software consulting and just slowly worked his way up the chain.

So now he's a

successful consultant in software and doing well for themselves up in Idaho.

But I'm counting the days until I can

buy him a very, very nice estate

up in North Idaho.

So yeah, it's exciting.

Good son.

Good son.

We'll see.

So you dropped out of high school at age 16.

Yes.

Why did you drop out of high school at age 16?

So there were two reasons.

I always knew that I wanted to start this company.

Well, I won't say always.

I've known since middle school that I wanted to start this company.

I've always been obsessed with nuclear.

And I was obsessed with nuclear because of my great-grandfather, who was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project.

And I was very close to my great-grandmother, who only died a few years ago.

Actually, she died when she was 100.

And I was very close to her.

And I kind of grew up talking to her about the Manhattan Project and the history of nuclear.

So I was always obsessed with that.

And I've known since I was about five years old that all I really want to do with my life is make thousands of machines.

But I didn't really know like which machines I should make.

I just knew I needed to make thousands of machines.

It's just something that I've always wanted to do.

But I thought nuclear was like sort of covered.

I thought people generally had it in hand because I would read these books about the history of nuclear and there's hundreds of different designs of reactors and they're all super sophisticated, super genius designs.

And there's a million smart people in the field.

And so I kind of had the mentality that like they've got it under control.

They don't need me.

Right.

And so that was my mentality.

It was more of a hobby.

But when I got to middle school, I started looking for who is the Elon of nuclear, right?

What's the Tesla or the SpaceX or the Ford or the Apple of nuclear?

Like who, who has really

taken this thing and created a trillion-dollar company around it?

And the answer to that question is no one.

In middle school.

Yeah.

You're doing this research in middle school.

That's right.

I mean, I was obsessed with Elon way back in the early days before Tesla, actually, back when they were launching Falcon 1 for the first time.

And I was sort of like, who's doing this, you know, in nuclear?

And again, the answer was like, nobody.

And that really surprised me.

And I started reading, I'd always read about the physics and I'd, you know, read every physics textbook I could find, that sort of thing.

But when I got to this, I was like, well, what does the business landscape look like?

Like, who's figured out how to make money from this?

And found that nobody had.

Like, nobody had been able to build a huge business that was extremely successful and was scaling all over the world to build nuclear power.

That kind of stopped me in my tracks.

And I was like, wait, why has nobody cracked this?

And that launched sort of a multi-year research project of like, how would you fix nuclear?

There must be something wrong here.

What's going on?

And, you know, by the time I was like 15 or so, I had basically figured it out in my head.

Like, I think I know it's wrong.

And so I wanted to start a company.

But again, grew up very poor.

I didn't know that venture capital was a thing.

I didn't know that existed.

And all I knew was that in order to start SpaceX, Elon had sold Zip2, which is a company that he started, and then PayPal.

And that had given him enough money to then go start SpaceX, and he put a lot of money into that.

And so I figured that's probably what I needed to do.

And I knew there were already many, many smart people in the field with PhDs in nuclear engineering and nuclear physics who are smarter than I was ever going to be.

And so when I was thinking about how do I go about fixing nuclear energy and starting this company, I realized that

the biggest problem for me to tackle was not going to school, going to college.

It was gaining gaining wealth and gaining business experience.

And so

naive, you know, my naivete said, well, then college is a waste of time.

And so I dropped out of school to start a business.

I was 16.

By that point,

I had already taught myself software engineering.

So by the time I was a 16-year-old, I was already making six figures in my parents' basement

writing software.

You know, just read books.

I found a book on C-sharp on my dad's shelf.

My dad's not a software engineer, but he's just a curious guy.

So he had a book on C Sharp.

I picked it up.

I read it, wrote some programs.

And yeah, by the time I was 16, I was making really good money doing that for various people just on a contract basis.

So I thought, well, I've got a little bit of money here.

I can go start a business.

I can sell that one.

I could start another one.

I could sell that one.

And then I'll get to starting Valor.

So that was my plan.

What did your parents think about you dropping out of school at age 16?

They were surprised.

I don't know.

Maybe they weren't that surprised.

They were like a little bit hesitant, but I don't know.

I think my dad's like philosophy of life for us was like, by the time you're 14, you're generally an adult and you know what you're going to do.

And

you can do what you want.

So I mean, he explicitly told me that.

Were you in some type of an accelerated educational program or just...

We were in a bunch of different schools all over the place.

My mom is a very, very intelligent woman um she just finished her uh college degree a couple years ago actually she dropped out of college uh to have my sister and then me um but she's just naturally very very smart um and i talked with her about math and physics and that kind of stuff all the time she did a great job of of uh teaching us um and so you know and i i had the opportunity to go to a a great uh public school in colorado as well that had some really fantastic teachers in it uh one particular uh physics teacher, Mr.

Halevin, if you're watching this, was very inspiring to me and taught kind of a core of guys in that class physics and really kind of took us under his wing to do that.

And so, yeah, you know, I felt like I had understood the fundamentals well enough.

And again, there's already so many smart people in nuclear who are like the smartest people in the world and are going to be always going to be smarter than I am.

And the problem is like, not the technical side, not the physics, but nobody's figured out how to, from a business scaling, manufacturing perspective, take this as a company and scale it all over the world.

And that's what I was obsessed with.

And that's what I was focused on.

So it just made the most sense for me to drop out, start my own business, get experience, try to get some money.

And that's essentially what I did.

It didn't work out nearly as well as Zip2 and PayPal,

but it worked out like well enough and I learned a ton.

And then I also learned that like venture capital exists and then you can you can go raise money.

So that was an eye-opener.

You know, I figured that out when I was

early 20s, and I realized, okay, maybe I don't actually need to spend the next decade of my life trying to start companies that I don't care about in order to get to the one that I do care about.

And so I was able to start this.

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I've spent years on this show pulling back the curtain and trying to reveal what's really happening in this country.

And the truth is, there's a double standard here in America.

You see time and time again, people defending themselves, defending their family, and then the judicial system goes after them.

It's a double standard.

And if you don't believe me, Check out episode number three with Don Bradley.

That is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

Because Because it's not just about what you did, believe it or not, it's how the legal system interprets it.

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This isn't about living in fear.

This is about being prepared when things go sideways.

You don't get to schedule danger, and with the world changing so fast, you have to do what you can to protect your family.

Check out the USCCA's risk-free membership at uscca.com slash srs that's uscca.com slash srs protect more than just your life protect your future go right now to uscca.com slash srs so how how so did you use vc yes so we're a vc backed company um an amazing set of investors who i'm extremely grateful to um in both san francisco and los angeles i started the company i filed it on july 4th 2023 so we're coming up on the two-year anniversary of filing the company.

But for the first six, six to eight months, I was really just raising money.

It was essentially me, my friend Elijah, and I had written this

like 200-page memo on how to fix nuclear energy.

And it was essentially just me running around, like handing that to people and like saying, hey, can I have a couple million dollars to go do this?

And I finally found somebody who said yes.

No shit.

What sold him?

What do you think sold him?

I mean, I think, so I'll tell you, you know, who it was.

Steve Marcus is the founder of Riot Ventures, which is a great deep tech fund in LA.

And the thing that's super unique about Steve is, you know, first of all, he's MIT trained.

Second of all, he started a bunch of his own companies before he got into venture, which means that he just thinks for himself, right?

And the problem in venture today that nobody's really figured out how to solve is that it's full of people who don't think for themselves.

And I would say that if you read my memo,

you would see that there are the ingredients in there that are going to be a trillion dollar company.

And if you have the confidence in your own intellect to be able to read that and break down the assumptions, you can find that, right?

But if you're looking at it from more of a signaling perspective or, you know, what are other people going to think about this, you might not get there.

So it really took a very unique person who understands the world on his own terms to write that check.

How many people did you have to pitch to before you?

I pitched 80 different VCs.

80 different VC firms.

Yeah.

And I got 80 no's.

Yeah.

What do you mean that?

What do you you mean that a lot of the VCs don't, people involved don't think for themselves?

They just straightforwardly don't.

VCs do not, do not trust their own intellect to understand a concept in front of them.

What they're trying to understand generally, this, again,

it's a split, right?

There's a couple VCs who are incredibly smart people who think for themselves, who trust their own minds to understand concepts.

But that's like a very small portion.

Pretty much all of the rest of them are trying to figure out like, is this company going to get funded in the next round or two?

Which really has very little to do with the concept in front of them and more to do with like, what network is this person from?

Who does he know?

And I was from zero network and knew nobody.

I was like literally living in a town of 20,000 people in North Idaho with like a crazy idea.

So

that was just not something that they were used to.

They were not looking at me and the idea.

They were looking at like, where am I from?

What networks networks am i am i going to get future capital down the road um which i think is a really bad way to underwrite companies like that's not how you should invest you should invest based on who the person is what their concept is how how well do they understand the world and do you agree with how they see the world uh but that's a rare person interesting interesting and so when when you're in middle school thinking about starting a nuclear reactor company yeah

I mean,

what were some of the deficiencies that you, I mean, why nuclear?

Were you just, Were you into power?

I mean,

did you research how weak the power grid is and how...

So obviously, like, my family history on the Manhattan Project gave me a predisposition to be interested in nuclear.

But I would like to think that I was extremely objective and wanted to find genuinely the cheapest way to make power.

That's really what I cared about.

And I was willing for that to not be nuclear.

In fact, for a while, I would say it was actually a little bit anti-nuclear, maybe a little bit as like a personal like anger that

this thing that I had been obsessed with for a long time wasn't happening, right?

It was really confusing to me.

So nuclear today makes about 6% of world energy, right?

So the, or electricity, about 6% of the global electric grid comes from nuclear reactors, which is really small, way too small.

And the fact that that's true and that you can look at all the most recent nuclear projects and they're over schedule and over budget and like not worth it made me me think for a while, like, okay, maybe I missed something.

Maybe nuclear is not as good as I thought.

And so, when I was,

when I was 14 or 15, I kind of went through this like journey and this process of like, all right, well, I'm going to back all the way up and try to think about like, what is the best form of energy?

What is going to be cheapest over the next hundred years?

Because I recognize that energy is going to matter over the next hundred years way more than it's ever mattered in the past.

As an economy, we are trending toward advanced manufacturing and AI.

And what does that mean?

Well, essentially, it means that what we think of as like producing things today is a mix of inputs from labor to raw materials to a little bit of energy.

But advanced manufacturing and robotics and AI basically turn everything into an energy function.

So like you've got a, you know, we've got a cool water bottle right here with the Sean Ryan Show branding on it.

Today, like if you're going to purchase this bottle,

there's a mix of like costs that go into this.

And some of them are labor costs, and some of them are raw material costs.

And then there's a bit of energy cost in that.

But if the factory is completely automated, then there's no labor cost.

And if the materials are also automated, right?

Like there's autonomous mining equipment that gets the aluminum, right?

And then it's run through an electrolyzer to get, you know, to electrolyze the bauxite.

And then it's run through an automated factory.

Well, what's the cost?

It's just energy, right?

So like eventually this thing is just going to cost energy.

And so I realized like that's, that's where we're heading.

And what that means is we need a ton of power.

And like civilizationally, like nationally, we need a ton of power if we're going to compete.

So I knew that this was incredibly important.

And so I backed up and I said, like, what is the best form of energy?

And I looked into every form of energy generation.

I looked into solar.

I looked into wind.

I looked into geothermal, oil and gas, fusion, basically

everything that we have on the table today.

And I came back to nuclear.

I realized nuclear really is the best, but we've been doing it wrong.

We've been building it all wrong.

And so that's kind of what I focused on.

We're going to go into a little bit of conspiracy land.

Okay, that sounds good.

Let's talk about Nikola Tesla.

Have you looked into that stuff?

I mean, somebody that's...

Are you talking about zero point?

Is this zero point energy?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so I don't know a ton about zero point.

I've looked into it a tiny bit.

Nikola Tesla is a very inspiring figure to me, for sure.

And I think we need a lot lot more people like him.

I will say my default frame is

energy is abundant in the universe.

So would I be surprised to find a cheat code where you can find just enormous amounts of energy?

I would not be surprised by that at all.

Like, I think that there's this mindset that there are no cheat codes and that you have to like...

you know, you have to suffer for any outcome.

And there's a human sense in which that's true.

But in the physical world, I think it's a lot more abundant than people assume.

I think nuclear is a cheat code compared to energy generation in the past.

Nuclear fission is a cheat code.

Like it's free energy.

It's just abundant free energy everywhere.

So the concept of something like zero point existing wouldn't surprise me.

That said, I'm really focused on technology, not science.

So we're a technology company, not a science company, which means we're using engineering to take known scientific principles to make energy cheap throughout the world.

So, my basic thought on that is: if somebody cracks zero point, they'll beat me.

But I don't think they will.

I don't think they will.

You know, that they will?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just a fascinating subject to me.

Yeah.

Dove into it a couple times, but I never really got anywhere.

Yeah.

So, well,

what are some of the challenges?

I mean, we were talking at breakfast and

I mean, it's to build a nuclear facility, I think you said it takes 20 years worth of paperwork.

Yeah, 20 years of all kinds of nonsense,

sometimes worse, right?

And that's mostly characteristic of nuclear in a very specific scenario, which is in the West in the last 30 years.

If you look outside of those two parameters, you'll find much, much better performance, right?

So if you look outside the West, China, you'll find much rap, you know, much more rapid building of nuclear power.

And if you look outside the last 30 years, you'll also find much more rapid building of nuclear power.

But we're in this weird eddy of last 30 years in the West, we forgot how to build nuclear reactors properly.

And this was really what I figured out when I was 15.

I kind of figured out a couple things that I identified as here's how you would go about fixing nuclear.

So the first one is I realized that the reactors just need to be smaller.

This sounds super basic, but I think it's true.

We're really good at building small things and we're really bad at building big things.

So especially now, right?

In the 50s and 60s, we were building huge civil infrastructure projects and we were super good at that.

And we had massive pools of labor that were really good at that, right?

People who could lay rebar really, really well, people who could do mass concrete laying,

who could build very large structures, who are super good at large-scale welding.

And those skills and pieces of labor sort of atrophied over the last 50 years, which is unfortunate, but it's true.

And then the other thing is like tooling.

So we don't have the capacity for like extremely large-scale forging anymore, right?

We're just not good at forging extremely large objects as well as we were.

So I looked at both of these things and saw that like, okay, if you're going to reboot nuclear today, you need to be inside the labor and tool chain that exists, which means smaller objects, right?

We're really good at making objects about the size of a bus.

If you try to make an object larger than an approximately a bus in at least the Western supply chains, you're going to have a really hard time, right?

The tools just don't exist.

You're going to have to be making custom tools.

You're going to have to be using pools of labor, which cost a lot of money and like there just aren't enough people trained.

So that was kind of my first conclusion is like, it's probably going to be a bus-sized object.

And then if that's not making enough power, then you just make more of them.

And that's very in line with manufacturing.

You want to make the same thing over and over.

That's how you get deep efficiencies.

The second thing that I realized was that the reason that hasn't happened yet is essentially because the regulatory environment has become too restricted for one specific thing, and that is testing.

So the regulatory framework for testing became very onerous and pretty much impossible.

And so people have had these ideas before.

People have thought about like, well, maybe we should try to make reactors smaller.

And there's been a lot of people who have tried that.

But they kind of ran into the brick wall of nuclear regulation and were not able to get those prototypes off the ground.

And so taking these two conclusions,

my formulation for like, how do you fix nuclear energy when I was 15 is we're going to make smaller reactors.

We're going to find a regulatory framework where we can rapidly move through prototypes, which means we're going to find a very unconventional regulatory path to do testing.

And then finally, once you have a nuclear site, we're going to build tons of reactors on that site, right?

So you don't just build one, you don't just build four, you build 100 or 200 or 1,000 all in the same place.

And the reason for this is that the most complicated part of nuclear is not actually the physical reactor itself.

Reactors are medium complicated.

Like I would argue that a nuclear reactor is less complicated than a diesel engine, for example.

It's significantly less complicated than a diesel engine.

Oh shit.

It is, yeah.

They're mechanically simple machines.

The thing that's complicated about them is the permission to do them on a certain patch of land, So you pick a piece of land and the process to go from it's an empty patch to the reactor sitting there through permitting, through environmental work, through community buy-in, through construction, security.

There's a lot of factors that go into getting nuclear to happen somewhere.

Once you've done that, you've done the hard part.

And so the natural conclusion is you should double down on that.

So you already have a nuclear site.

Why not keep building reactors there?

and keep doing that like way more than anyone thinks is possible.

So this is really sort of the core DNA of Valor.

And these are conclusions that I had when I was 15.

And I've really been working on that for the last 10 years.

Wow.

We haven't built any meaningful nuclear facilities in about 40 years, correct?

So, we built two.

We built two.

So, two units turned on in Georgia: Vogel 1, sorry, Vogel 3 and Vogel 4.

So, these were sort of additions to an existing plant, and those turned on in, I think, 2019 and 2020, I believe, is is when those turned on.

So we have two.

Now, that project was a disaster.

It was eight years over timeline and about $15 billion over budget.

So

it's a travesty, really.

It was power should be cheap, right?

The whole point of nuclear is that it's cheap.

That should be the point of nuclear, at least.

So I would say that that was a failure.

Hinkley Point C in the UK is another example of this.

Many years over budget, billions and billions of dollars over budget.

And so our only recent examples of building nuclear in the West are essentially failures.

Wow.

What is,

I mean, like I mentioned, we talked a lot about bureaucrats and bureaucracy and how it gets in the way.

And so

what are some of the reasons that nuclear has been pushed to the side and stalled?

And

why have we not been innovating

in the nuclear sector?

So it's all downstream of public perception, right?

We can talk about the regulators locking things down too much, which is absolutely true, especially when it comes to testing.

But the reason they did that is essentially responding to public sentiment.

So what drove public sentiment away from nuclear?

Well, I think it was a combination of like

people naturally fear new things.

the atomic bombs and the nuclear bombs sort of being associated with nuclear.

And then I think some really specific intentional propaganda.

know, I believe that rivals of the United States have continuously funded environmental groups to spread a narrative about nuclear and even to sue nuclear projects.

Who stemmed, where did that stem from?

So I think there's a couple of sources.

Russia is known to be a source of this.

No shit.

This is public record now that Russia, most recently, like in the last five years in Europe, funded far-left environmental groups to advocate for shutting down nuclear power in Europe so that Europe would become more dependent on Russian natural gas.

Wow.

This is just public record.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, they fell head over heels for the PSYOP that nuclear was unsafe, that it was not clean, right?

This is sort of the, this is the biggest scandal of environmental policy, environmental advocacy in the last 50 years is that

the environmental groups in theory have good goals, right?

You want the earth to be clean.

You don't want to pollute it.

You want our kids to be able to live in beautiful places with nature.

And so on the surface, it's very easy to get people to get on board with that mission.

But nuclear energy is so obviously the best possible solution to clean power.

It's just pure physics.

It emits no carbon.

It emits no particulates.

The only thing that you have to deal with after running a a nuclear reactor is incredibly, incredibly small,

safe pellets that you encase into concrete casks, and they have

no effect on the environment at all, right?

So there's basically no impact to the environment, and they provide clean power.

So this is a very, very obvious thing that environmental groups should love, but they were co-opted.

They were co-opted by...

external money that wanted the nuclear industry to fail and wants the United States to fail and wanted Europe to fail or become more dependent on other sources from our rivals.

And so I think that, you know, and a lot of people just bought into that.

A lot of people,

you know, there's always good people in any bad thing.

And the good people just believed the narrative.

They believed that nuclear was unsafe and they believed that,

you know, nuclear waste was a huge problem.

Neither of those things are true.

Nuclear waste is not a huge problem.

And nuclear reactors are the safest form of power generation on earth.

Full stop.

And so so are you saying that Russia

funded U.S.

NGOs to basically

shit on the nuclear-like they did in Europe.

Yes, the Sierra Club.

If any members of Congress want to start some investigations, I would start by looking at the Sierra Club and the advocacy that they did against nuclear, especially around environmental law.

They figured out how to essentially shut down nuclear by suing over safety regulations and environmental policy to prevent nuclear projects from happening, and obviously, you know, mass sort of social advocacy against nuclear.

And I believe that they had significant foreign funding to push those narratives.

Wow.

What are some of the government players that get in the way?

I have DOD, DOE, NRC.

Yeah, so this is an interesting one, right?

Like, let's talk about why regulations exist and what the good case for regulation is, right?

So nuclear has the potential to cause harm to humans and the environment if it's done wrong.

And we need to do a lot of it, right?

So the natural conclusion to that is you need a regulator.

A regulator is going to protect the public and protect the environment from things going wrong in nuclear energy.

This is the same for any mass industry, right?

If you have a chemical plant, you have regulators which make sure that those chemicals aren't going to leak into the river, right?

If you have even a coal station, right, or a natural gas station, you're going to have regulators which make sure that it doesn't blow up and it doesn't kill people.

So this is a good thing that we have as part of society.

Now,

one thing I think people miss about regulations is that regulations really, regulators in particular, really only know how to regulate things that exist.

They don't know how to regulate things that don't exist yet.

And what that means is that you have to always have an open space for innovation.

We're an innovative country.

We're a country that sources a lot of our power, power in the political sense, from technology.

We are a technological society that wields power throughout the world through our technological supremacy.

And

if you want that to maintain,

if you want that to stay true,

you need innovation.

You need to continue allowing entrepreneurs to push what technology is forward every year.

And the way that you do that is you allow them to innovate and you allow them to test.

So the mistake that regulators sometimes make in various industries is that they try to apply the same regulatory framework to existing technology.

They try to take that and then apply it to innovation.

That doesn't work, right?

Because innovation is new, right?

Innovation is about technology that doesn't exist yet.

And you can only regulate things that exist.

Like you're putting down guardrails around a thing that exists.

So some industries have figured out how to do this really well.

So I would say aviation is a good example.

Aviation has a robust test framework where if you have an idea for an airplane, you can go take it out into the desert, you can build your plane, and you can fly it and you can even crash it, right?

You try not to crash it, but like there's a regulatory framework that allows you to test.

And what that means is that in aerospace, you get to very, very quickly move through these different prototypes.

And aviation is now this incredibly safe thing, right?

It's safer than driving, right?

Flying on a commercial jet is safer than driving your car.

And the only reason that's possible is because the regulators have created this space where innovators can just like test stuff.

So that's what's been missing in nuclear primarily.

You can talk about all sorts of other problems with the NRC.

We talked about Alara, talking about linear no threshold, some of the bad policies that have, you know, taken the sort of existing industry and corrupted it and made it expensive.

But I would say even more fundamental than that is that you have to test.

If we're going to be dominant in nuclear, you have to allow innovators, entrepreneurs, technologists to create a small reactor, turn it on, and test it out.

If you can't do that, you don't have an industry, or at least you won't have an industry in a decade or two.

Who is the NRC?

So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a commission created by Congress in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.

It's sort of gone through a couple iterations and various acts of Congress since then.

But it has five commissioners, and it's responsible for regulating nuclear.

And I would say it's not done a good job of that.

And the evidence for the fact that it has not done a good job of that is since 1979,

the NRC has approved four construction permits.

Four.

One, two, three.

Since when?

Since 1979.

Jeez.

In the meantime, China has built dozens of reactors and is currently building 30.

So there are 30 nuclear reactors under construction in China today.

Wow.

And that's a brand new thing for China, right?

China has just gotten into this.

But since 1979, the NRC has granted four construction permits.

That's a dead regulator, right?

That is a regulator which needs rapid overhaul, fundamental overhaul.

And the Trump administration is working on that.

So I'm very grateful about that.

What is, I mean, it sounds like the Trump administration has been very easy to work with for innovators like yourself.

And so what are they doing that's different?

Absolutely.

Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.

I am unbelievably excited about it.

This administration is very unique.

I have never seen such a density of talented, motivated people working in government before.

If you talk to the people who are in the White House, who are in the agencies today, they are not the people that you would normally see working in government.

In many, many cases, they are people who are taking sometimes 10x pay cuts, right?

They're making 10% of what they were making in the the private sector, but they're doing it out of a spirit of national service, right?

They believe that this is an existential threat to the country to fix these issues, to be able to make power again.

And so you have people making genuine life sacrifices to work in government and to fix it.

And I mean, you have to give

President Trump credit for that in bringing this unbelievably talented,

motivated group of people together.

to do that.

This is all it's all action, right?

If you go into any of the agencies today, you would have seen in the last 20 years, really, you would have seen a lot of policies and a lot of papers and a lot of thoughts and very little action.

And today it's all action everywhere.

Wow.

Are you in contact with Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy?

So Chris is like probably the best example of this.

And it's like, you know, easy for me to say because I'm in nuclear and the DOE is leading the charge on this.

But from Chris all the way down through his staff, you have the most motivated people I've ever seen picking up the baton from the president.

There's these executive orders that went out three weeks ago.

And they basically gave the mandate to the Department of Energy that we need to turn on nuclear reactors immediately.

And in fact, they set a date.

So by July 4th, 2026, the president has ordered that the DOE allow three advanced reactors to turn on on American soil outside the national lab system.

So this is unbelievably exciting.

It's what the nuclear industry has been waiting for for decades.

This is what we need.

This is that test framework that we have to have in order to beat China.

And again, like the reason this is happening is that the administration recognizes that we must beat China on AI, on manufacturing.

We have to reshore the ability to build things in the real world.

And so I would say everybody in the administration is absolutely focused and dialed on how do we allow American entrepreneurs to move forward and to do what we do best, which is innovate and build the best technology in the world.

Perfect.

Well, Isaiah, let's take a quick break.

When we come back, I want to talk about how bad our power grid is.

Sounds good.

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All right, Isaiah, we're back from the break.

I wanted to talk about some of the vulnerabilities in our power grid system.

And I think you would be the perfect guy to talk to about that.

So, you know, I've dove into this quite a few times

with different guests.

The first one was actually a guy that made a documentary about how vulnerable our grid is.

And, I mean, he's talking about how much of our grid is manufactured in China, from solar panels to transformers to vulnerabilities and power stations and how they're not guarded.

And I mean, I mean, everybody sees them.

Drive by on the side of the road, and it's got a chain lane fence and maybe if you're lucky, some barbed wire up top.

And he talks about, you know, how somebody could get in there and just shoot those up and basically disable them, how it would take years to get a new transformer because

they're so large

that it would, it would, and they come, most of them come from China.

It would take, I mean, they would have to take over passes out to get them in place.

Talks about Trojan horses and malware and the grid system.

Absolutely.

And so anyways,

without covering all of it, I want to talk to you about, you know, what kind of vulnerabilities do we face?

Yeah.

Well, first off, I would just point out that the grid is old.

I think fundamentally the grid is an old piece of infrastructure.

And it's part of this whole decay problem that we've had in the United States where we've stopped building physical world technology.

And we've also stopped building physical world technology.

that has anything to do with like civil infrastructure.

And part of this is a legal problem.

It's because our environmental laws became extremely overbearing and made it hard to do anything.

And it's also because we stopped manufacturing here, right?

So we should make transformers in the United States.

We should make a lot of transformers here.

There are a few companies working on this, right?

Maddox Industrial Transformer is a great American company.

It's working on making domestic transformers.

Super, super awesome.

I hope that they can scale fast enough to what we need to do over the next few years.

But the other thing I'd point out is I think technology over time becomes more decentralized.

This is This is a common thing that happens as technologies mature: you figure out how to do them in different ways.

One of the big issues with our grid is how centralized it is, which creates vulnerabilities across a large spectrum.

Will you get a little more into it?

What do you mean by a centralized grid?

Yeah, so the grid is so interconnected with itself and so interdependent on itself that if you hit one piece of grid in one state, you might be taking out a piece of infrastructure in other states.

A grid is a very balanced, tricky thing, right?

You're trying to keep

perfect synchronism between many, many, many moving parts.

It's physical machinery, it's the load side, it's transformers.

All of these are highly sensitive pieces of equipment, which are syncing up around this 60 hertz, right?

So 60 times per second, switching the polarity of an electrical field, and many, very complicated pieces of equipment plugging into that.

And the larger you make that system, I would argue, the more fragile you make the system, right?

Because a failure in one area can cause a failure in the entire thing.

There's lots of protections and safeguards that we try to add to make sure that doesn't happen.

But there's a fundamental principle here, which is that a centralized system is a vulnerable system, right?

If you can take out one piece of it, the rest of it goes down.

We saw this in Spain, right,

a couple months ago.

And so I think the...

Other than the very obvious things to do, which is secure our infrastructure, apply cybersecurity, companies like Galvanic working on that,

and trying to manufacture things here and making sure that we actually are building new grid infrastructure.

I also think that we move toward a concept called microgrids.

So microgrids are exactly what they sound like.

They are smaller grids.

And rather than trying to have a perfectly in-sync, extremely large system, you have more smaller systems.

So that no matter what, if you take down this piece of infrastructure, you've taken down like one town, right?

Or maybe two, but you haven't taken down an entire state.

So this kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, where one of your reactors could power a small town.

Yeah.

So each town would have their own reactor.

And that would be a decentralized grid.

That would be decentralized.

I think that it's probably not one town to one reactor.

It's probably a cluster of towns to a cluster of reactors.

But I think that we're certainly moving closer to that and less how it is today, which is like groups of states, right, that are sharing grids with each other and then sharing vulnerabilities with each other, especially as I think loads become a lot more spiky, right?

So what is a spiky load?

Well, it means like you have a data center, which is consuming a ton of power, right?

Previously, data centers were like 50 megawatts max.

That was like the biggest data center.

And then it became a couple hundred megawatts.

And now we're looking at gigawatt scale data centers.

We're going to start to see microgrids evolve.

from huge power demand sources, which is good because trying to add a massive load to the grid is going to exhaust not just the resources, but trying to follow the demand for that load becomes increasingly tenuous and the consequences are just larger.

So I think, again, if we want to fix this problem, there's really simple things to do.

Fix the environmental policy to make it possible to build grid infrastructure, right?

So we're talking about NEPA, we're talking about state-level reforms.

Build things in the United States again.

transformers and other power electronics and build smaller grids right and and i would also argue it should be somewhat generation-led, right?

You find a good place to generate energy.

It's a good place to put 10 nuclear reactors, 100 nuclear reactors down, build a microgrid around that for data centers for manufacturing, and then start to share that energy, start to expand that grid out a little bit.

But I think that the old style of massively centralized systems is probably going away a little bit, and that's a good thing.

Another reason that I think that we went this sort of like centralized direction was that our power generating units used to be much larger.

So you'd have gigawatt scale power generation, which needed a very large

base to hook into.

So you had a gigawatt scale reactor.

Reactors traditionally were not load following.

Now they are, but they traditionally were not load following.

And so you have to plug into a really, really broad base of demand.

And now that reactors are load following and that the reactors that we make are going to be smaller, you actually can just put a couple of these reactors onto a single grid grid or even 10 and you're only at 250 megawatts.

So smaller, more decentralized, much, much less vulnerable to centralized attack.

So if we're talking about decentralized power grids, does that mean that we would have to

reinvent the entire grid to make it decentralized?

Because if everything's centralized.

We're going to have to.

We're going to have to reinvent the, like, let's, let's not kid ourselves.

Over the next 30 years, we're going to have to reinvent the entire grid no matter what, right?

Even if we decided that we're going to continue with centralization, in order to triple our grid capacity, you're going to build a lot of infrastructure, right?

So, I think

this is not an option to not reinvent the grid.

The grid will be reinvented, and it's either going to be reinvented with more, bigger, centralized infrastructure, or it's going to be reinvented around dynamic, smaller, decentralized infrastructure.

And I think that second one is the right way to go.

It definitely sounds like it's the right way to go.

I mean, now, redoing our entire grid, I mean, that is a

huge project, but it seems like it seems like nobody has it's it almost seems like everybody's scared to touch it.

The only place that I've seen

upgrade their infrastructure, and this is just from from a visibility standpoint.

I have family in Florida.

I'm from Florida.

Hurricanes wiped the grid out.

You go back down there and you see what they build, and it's not wooden telephone poles that look like they're going to fall over.

They're these huge metal,

maybe steel.

I don't know what the hell they are, but they're definitely metal

power lines.

Is that what it would look like?

Or

what's going to carry the load on a decentralized grid?

Yeah, absolutely.

New power line infrastructure.

Again, I think one of the reasons that people are afraid of this issue is that we haven't properly brought private industry and capitalism into that solution set, right?

America is incredibly good at using its technologists to solve thorny problems, and we use the profit incentive to do that, right?

People People like me, people like my employees who see an opportunity to solve an enormous problem and make an enormous amount of money in the process, right?

This is how we as Americans figure out how to solve the hardest problems on earth.

And the way that you can muck up that process is by introducing laws and legislations that make it impossible to fix the problem with the profit incentive through private companies.

And the way that we've done that is through, again, environmental policy, through some of the centralized federal regulatory programs around the grid.

When you try to manage all of this at the top, you become very bad at governing, right?

The higher you try to govern a thing, the worse you become at governing it.

Now, there's a too small version as well.

So

there's some middle point here.

But the middle point is much further toward decentralization than it is towards centralization today.

There's actually a concept here that I'm sure you're aware of called anti-fragility.

I'm not aware of that.

So this is a Nassim Taleb concept, and there are systems which benefit from chaos, and there are systems which are punished by chaos or degrade from chaos.

So

this is generally called like fragile, robust, and anti-fragile, right?

A fragile system,

a glass is a good example of this.

A glass is a fragile thing.

If you knock it with a hammer, it could shatter.

A steel cup would be an example of a robust thing, right?

If you knock it with a hammer,

it's probably fine.

But then there's this third category of thing, which is called anti-fragile.

And what that means is like the more you knock it with the hammer, the better it gets.

And I would argue that what you just mentioned in Florida is a good example of this, where the fact that they have hurricanes which knock out the grid infrastructure actually means that they have a better grid, right?

Because the chaos of that situation has allowed them to figure out how to evolve and to get better.

And if you look at human systems, the best human systems are anti-fragile, and capitalism is an anti-fragile system, right?

Private companies using the profit incentive to fix problems on a smaller scale, on a decentralized scale, is extremely anti-fragile.

If you add chaos into that, people actually learn and get better and grow rather than becoming more fragile.

So when you're thinking about governance, I think this is just a general property of regulation.

It's like you need to figure out how to make that system anti-fragile, which means allowing for variance.

You have to allow for for different people and different companies to do things different ways.

And that's exactly what microgrids are, right?

Utah has a different idea of what a microgrid is than ERCOT and Texas, for example.

And those different ideas will look slightly different in the world, and they'll have different outcomes.

And then we can compare and contrast.

And we could say, oh, they did that really well here.

Let's copy that over there.

Oh, Florida figured out how to make this resilient.

Let's copy it in California, right?

Whereas if you try to keep everything highly centralized at the top, you don't go through that learning process and you become increasingly fragile over time.

So I think that today that's exactly where our grid is.

It's very fragile.

And it's fragile because it's centralized, because it does not admit of variance, because it's done the exact same way everywhere, because it's federally regulated by environmental policy.

FERC would be an example.

Other regulations that touch that for power electronics.

And so if we want to fix this problem, you need to use capitalism to fix it.

That's what we're really good at as Americans.

And to do that, you have to decentralize.

You have to let different companies try different strategies and fix the problem.

Why do you think this may be a little off topic from what we're talking about, but I always wonder, you know, why aren't we not putting the power lines underground?

That seems to be where they would be the least fragile.

So the technical reason for this is

resistance.

So you're going to lose power.

Power does not travel through

the cable.

It travels through the electrical field around the cable.

And so if a power line is underground, you have resistance with the ground.

The electrical field, the electromagnetic field is actually traveling through the dirt and you're picking up all sorts of resistance along that.

So burying cables, now maybe we're making enough energy that we don't care about that and we just decide to bury it.

But another way to think about this is like, keep it above ground because it's cheaper that way and because you lose less energy.

And then have it more decentralized, right?

Which means like one cable set going down doesn't destroy the whole grid.

That's an alternative way to to do it.

And then you don't really have to worry about the fact that they're above ground or that one transformer got blown up or these sorts of things.

If it's broken up into smaller risk areas and it's diversified, then you just don't have to worry about these problems that much and the system solves itself.

So if the electrical current is actually on the

exterior of the power line, that's what it sounds like.

Yes.

Question for you.

Could you put the lines in a pipe?

Yep.

Like

a culvert or something.

Yeah, another way you can do this is with insulation, that sort of thing.

Again, anything underground is more expensive, right?

You're digging, you know, you've got groundwork, you're thinking about ground stability, these sorts of things.

And these are problems we figured out.

So the short answer to your question is like, yes, you certainly could bury the lines and that would solve some of the vulnerability problem.

And my argument to that would be like, let's try that.

Let's try that in a microgrid.

And let's try another grid over here that has above ground infrastructure.

And we're going to learn a lot of lessons.

And maybe we'll find out that the buried infrastructure had a a different vulnerability than the above ground did.

But if this one goes down, this one didn't.

And we learn and evolve through time.

And that's really how technology works.

All of technology is something that learns and evolves through time.

It's not static.

I think this is one thing that people miss about technology is that it's constantly changing.

And the danger of regulation, and I think one of the tasks that the next 10 to 15 years of American law and policy is going to have to figure out is to figure out how to allow technology to evolve in that way and how to try to decentralize a lot of the policy that we've put in place.

Because frankly, we're getting outbuilt.

We're getting outbuilt all over the world.

China is building not just nuclear reactors better than us, but now they're building cars better than us, right?

We didn't expect that to happen.

And in all these cases, I would say that we're not properly allowing entrepreneurs to build the right technology and we're centralizing it too much.

Well, you know, I guess China too, I just had this gentleman, Steve Kwast on.

I don't know if you've heard, he's got a company called Space Built, and he was talking about how China's mining helium-3 off the backside of the moon.

Okay, yep.

And do you know anything about helium-3?

I do, yeah.

You know, I think

this is one of these things.

China is not just outbuilding us with technology.

They're doing some really interesting things in science as well.

I don't particularly think that helium-3 is the right scientific solution.

I think that our energy technology is better than Helium-3.

But it's a good example of like China is outbuilding us.

They're outbuilding us in the physical world.

And we're sleepy.

Frankly, the American technology industry has become sleepy in pretty much everything except software, right?

In software, we still have an edge

and we've led in AI in many cases and we've certainly led in software products.

But now we're starting to bump up against physical limits in software, right?

Because we need data centers and we don't have them.

We need power for data centers and we don't have it.

So even where we have been excelling, which is software, we're starting to hit the limits of the fact that we just haven't been building enough.

So in every area, we have to fix this with the way that Americans do things, which is private companies motivated by profit, solving a huge problem.

And the way that we do that is through decentralization, through deregulation, through allowing Americans to go build.

When you're talking about a decentralized grid and testing and all these things, I mean, I don't, I mean,

knowing not much, you know, I would think that you can't take a small town of 15,000 people and say, hey, you guys are going to be our test case.

Maybe you could.

Yeah.

But

if so, is that what you would do to test the microgrid?

Or would you do something like, hey, we're going to power this data center, we're going to power this shopping complex or you know?

No, that's exactly right.

Yeah.

No, I think it's it's going to be piloted in data centers.

It already is being piloted in some data centers.

And that's where I think the natural evolution here is that you're going to have these what I call industrial power campuses.

At Valor, we call these gigasites.

A giga site is essentially a place where we build many nuclear reactors.

We power data centers.

We power aluminum electrolysis.

We power advanced manufacturing.

We create chemical fuels.

So there's a great amount of power.

And that power begins to be sold outside of that.

you know, very small industrial grid, well, large power, small footprint industrial grid, and we begin to serve communities outside of that.

So I think it's going to be a natural evolution.

And there needs to be regulatory change for that to happen.

Only a few states have like sort of figured this out and gotten ahead of the ball and drafted and passed legislation to make this legal.

Utah is one of them.

That's where our first nuclear project is in the United States.

But there are other people.

Put your power in there.

So

we...

I went on Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago with the governor of Utah, and we announced together that we have the San San Rafael Energy Research Center in Emory County, Utah where we're going to be turning on our first test reactor.

So super exciting.

The goal is July 4th next year.

Incredibly, incredibly important, important moment for the United States if we can hit that date.

Extremely excited about it.

We'll build more reactors there as well.

And I do think we'll power data centers there.

And beyond the data centers, again, there will be electrolysis, there will be manufacturing, and we'll see where it goes after that.

Our thought here is that we need to begin building power for the most critical things.

And if we allow ourselves to deregulate and decentralize, the problem will sort of fix itself, right?

Because people need power and there's these new generation sources coming online in their own grids.

And you can start just to hook it up, right?

One small project at a time, which again, you can use the profit motive for that.

You'll have companies who are in the business of

hooking up this line to that line and separating this grid from that grid and beginning to do that in a natural fashion, which is what we're really good at.

What are some of the red pills that nobody, the nuclear red pills that nobody's talking about?

Yeah, nuclear is really counterintuitive.

People do not understand the magnitude of nuclear.

So before I talk about nuclear, let's talk about coal for a second.

So coal is really cool.

I like coal a lot.

If you're holding a chunk of coal in your hand, you're holding a pretty extraordinary thing, right?

You're holding a chunk of energy, and that's super exciting.

So, you know, if you're digging and you find a chunk of coal, what have you found?

Well, holding it in your hand, the chunk of coal that fits about the size of your hand has so much energy in it.

It has enough energy to propel you, your body, about five and a half miles into the sky, right?

If you expended all that energy on pushing you up off the surface of the planet, you would go about five and a half miles into the sky.

If you put that into a car, right, which is a big, heavy thing, you know, it can take all your family and your groceries and everything.

You can go about 10 miles down the road with, you know, that chunk of coal.

So it's an extraordinary, extraordinary thing.

And it served us very well as humanity to be able to do that.

Now, one very, very counterintuitive fact about nuclear is that nuclear fuel is spread all throughout the earth, right?

There's a couple of caches and deposits of uranium and thorium that are more concentrated, but nuclear in general is just like spread throughout the earth.

So about 10 parts per million of every just rock outside has, you know, 10 parts per million is nuclear material.

There's trace nuclear material and basically every rock that you pick up outside.

Here's a crazy fact for you.

So we talked about this chunk of coal that fits in your hand and how much energy it has in it.

If you go outside the studio right now and you find a rock that's the same size, And you ask how much energy is in that nuclear energy.

The answer is about 100 times more energy than the chunk of coal.

Are you serious?

Every single rock that you pick up outside of the studio is as if you're holding a 100x chunk of coal in terms of energy.

If you take those trace amounts of uranium and thorium and you were to fully fission those in a fast reactor,

you would get 100 times more energy, which is, to take our original example, enough to propel you about 30 kilometers, your body,

off of the Earth.

So about a third of the way to space,

every single rock that you find out in the garden on the side of the road.

Wow.

So nuclear is it is the future, right?

You can look at that and say, okay, when we discovered nuclear energy, we essentially discovered that the entire planet is as valuable as a coal mine, right?

Which is very valuable and very energetic.

So I think people underestimate radically how much nuclear fuel there is.

It's under our feet at all times.

We could be using it.

We should be using it.

You had mentioned being able to convert, I don't know the terminology, you mentioned being able to convert nuclear

into

burning clean gas or something.

Something like that.

Can you elaborate on that?

Yes.

So this is really, really exciting.

We talked a little bit before,

I think before we started the cameras here about what does the future of energy look like?

Do we use all nuclear?

Do we continue using oil and gas?

A very contrarian thing that I believe is that I think that humanity continues to use hydrocarbons, right?

So we're talking about diesel, jet fuel, gasoline,

for a long time.

And in fact, I think that hydrocarbons are sort of the perfect fuel.

It's hard to imagine a better fuel than a hydrocarbon.

It's very dense.

It could be a liquid.

It's non-toxic.

It has elements you already find in the atmosphere.

It's one half of an oxidation reaction, which means the oxygen's already there.

So you only have to carry half of it, right?

Normally

with chemical energy, you need to carry two buckets around, right?

And then you mix the buckets and you get heat.

Well, hydrocarbons, you only carry one bucket because the other half of the bucket's in the air.

It's oxygen.

So it's sort of the perfect fuel that you could imagine.

But where does it come from?

So right now it comes from underground, which is fine.

It served humanity very, very well.

We've propelled ourselves to the civilization that we are today, essentially through drilling oil and burning it.

And that's awesome.

But I think we can do even better.

The way that we do even better is that we are eventually going to get hydrocarbons from the air.

What do I mean by that?

Well, the air already has all the ingredients for a hydrocarbon.

It has carbon and hydrogen, right?

So the carbon is in CO2, which is everywhere in the atmosphere.

The hydrogen is from water, which is also everywhere in the atmosphere.

And all you need to do is energize CO2 and water.

So it's sort of think about this like reversing combustion, right?

So when you have combustion, you start with a hydrocarbon and you mix it with oxygen and you get energy out of that and you get CO2 and water.

So that's combustion in a normal engine.

We kind of do the opposite.

We start with those combustion ingredients, the CO2 and the water, we put energy back into them and we get a hydrocarbon.

So I believe that that process will be driven by nuclear.

And what that means is we're essentially using hydrocarbons as a distribution mechanism for very cheap nuclear power.

So if you have a bunch of nuclear reactors all on a campus, again, we call this a gigacite, you're producing huge amounts of power and we can certainly push electrons in a wire and produce electricity, but we can distribute all of that valuable energy in another way, which is to build hydrocarbons and then ship the hydrocarbon.

So this is like us producing energy.

forming it into a hydrocarbon and then shipping that energy in the form of a hydrocarbon.

And I do believe that as nuclear becomes cheaper and cheaper, that the price of that hydrocarbon is going to become significantly cheaper than oil.

It'll become cheaper than drilling oil and refining it and distributing it.

Interesting.

You know, I am kind of surprised to hear you say that we still have a place for fossil fuels.

Absolutely.

You know, I mean, we see, you know,

obviously Tesla, you know, they're doing the,

I saw, I think it was last week, they started the Robo taxis in Austin.

You know, a lot of the cars are going to batteries.

Talked to Dino Mavrukas, the CEO of Seronic, and he's talking about how they're powering their small boats and batteries.

Some of the bigger ones are doing diesel.

But I mean, why wouldn't you want to put a

small modular nuclear reactor in something like a naval vessel

or a car

and get rid of all this shit?

Yeah.

So I think the short answer is like EVs are going to continue to be a massive thing.

I have a a Tesla Model 3.

I love it.

It's amazing.

I never have to fill it up.

I also have a gas car as well, and that's useful for other use cases.

I think the answer is we're going to do a lot more of both.

We'll have a lot more battery-powered things, and we'll have a lot more hydrocarbons.

And the reason is there's something very irreplaceable about a hydrocarbon.

And those things are energy density, right?

So energy density meaning how much energy do you get per weight?

and per volume.

So if you have a container, right, you have like a box that you're putting either either a battery in or you're putting a fuel tank in, hydrocarbons are about 40 times better than batteries, right?

So in the same amount of space, you can carry 40 times, sorry, the same amount of weight, 40 times the energy.

So that's pretty irreplaceable for things like aircraft, for example, right?

An F-35 Lightning is never going to be powered by lithium-ion.

It's just not.

right you have to get the the power density of a hydrocarbon to run that thing um

there's a a class of ships, right, which will always need something with the energy density of a hydrocarbon.

You just can't fit all those batteries and they're going to be too heavy to run a long-range ship.

Short-range ships, for sure, smaller ships, for sure.

And then absolutely, there will be some nuclear vessels as well.

But there's just this really broad set of use cases where you need energy density.

And hydrocarbons just have such incredible, irreplaceable energy density.

The other thing is they're...

And nuclear wouldn't fill that.

So for cars, for example, I don't think so.

I don't think that we'll have nuclear cars.

Or let me say it another way.

I think we will have nuclear cars, but it will be nuclear-generated diesel that then goes into a car.

Gotcha.

Or nuclear-generated electricity that powers a car.

Nuclear reactors don't like being small.

They're sort of a minimum size that you want to build a nuclear reactor, and trying to get it smaller than that is a very, very difficult engineering challenge.

It's a safety challenge.

It's a weight challenge.

It's an exotic materials challenge.

So there's sort of a good form factor for a nuclear reactor.

And then, you know, what it does is make really cheap energy, and you can transfer that energy to other forms.

You can turn it into electrons, power a battery.

You can turn it into jet fuel, power a jet.

But hydrocarbon is such a beautiful thing.

It's a liquid, right?

I think

we take hydrocarbons for granted.

The fact that hydrocarbons are a liquid is this insane unlock.

Like, think about the fact that you can pour energy into a container.

That's irreplaceable, right?

If you need to go and take fuel to somebody in a remote location, you're not taking a battery, right?

You're taking a canister of fuel, unless you're prepared to carry 40 more containers for the same amount of energy.

And so, yeah, there's all of these places where hydrocarbons are civilizational-level technology, which we should not replace quickly.

One more example of this is actually distribution.

This is very counterintuitive.

So,

I like to point point out to people, we talk about the energy grid, the electrical grid.

And we think of the electrical grid as the way that we move energy around the world.

But the electrical grid is actually a very, very small fraction of how we move energy around the world.

It's very tiny.

How we actually move energy around the world is by shipping hydrocarbons.

The numbers here is about 8%.

8% of energy movement is electric.

92% of energy movement is hydrocarbon.

So just an example.

We talked about different scales of power, gigawatts and megawatts.

The largest electrical site on planet Earth is the Three Gorges Dam in China.

So it's the largest concrete structure ever created by humans.

Massive, massive hydroelectric dam in China.

It has a nominal nameplate generation of about 22 gigawatts.

In practicality, it makes about 17 gigawatts.

Huge, huge energy facility.

And it distributes these through massive electrical cables that snake all throughout China.

We have a pipeline coming down from Canada called the Keystone Pipeline.

The Keystone Pipeline is a pipe about this wide.

It's standard steel, right?

About that thick.

And you can calculate how much energy does that thing push.

And you can, this is going to be a chemical energy figure, not electrical, but it's basically the same thing.

It's just energy.

The Keystone Pipeline moves about 50 gigawatts of continuous power.

So about about two three gorgeous dams.

We can call it a six gorgeous dam if you want.

Two to three times the three gorgeous dam worth of power in a pipeline that's this big.

Wow.

So hydrocarbons are civilizational level technology.

They are required to move energy between nations to power high energy density formats to get to Mars, right?

If we want to go to Mars, we're doing that with hydrocarbons, right?

Starship is powered by methane, right, which is a hydrocarbon.

So there's all of these use cases, which I think are very underappreciated, and we'll continue to use hydrocarbons for a very long time.

You know, earlier also,

we had talked about how Russia is influencing NGOs and lobbying firms and stuff about, you know, to create a narrative against nuclear.

And so, I'm curious, I mean, when it comes to energy, I mean,

it's obviously a very profitable business.

And so, when you are

a threat to oil and gas,

green energy, I mean,

do you feel like you have narratives against you that are put on through them?

I mean, I read something,

I don't know, maybe about six months ago that said that you remember the big power outage in Texas when they had that winter storm.

What was that last year or two years ago?

Two years ago, yeah, something like that.

You know,

we had all heard, you know, oh, it's because, you know, the solar panels were freezing and the wind turbines were freezing.

What I actually read was that the pipelines

from gas were freezing and the gas industry was really on top of it and had created this narrative and pushed it out that it was, oh,

the wind turbines had frozen, the solar panels had snow and shit on them and they couldn't produce.

And so

it was a, if it was true, which I don't know if it is, then that's, maybe you know, was that true?

Yeah, no, that's, that's absolutely right.

The, the freeze in Texas was very related to gas.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's temperature profiles where gas doesn't work as well, especially if you don't build it for that.

And this was a very uncharacteristic event for Texas, and it hadn't really been built for that yet.

So it is true.

So, I mean, so right there, I mean, oil and gas was on their game and pushed a narrative which

was an elude.

Yeah.

It was a false narrative that

was,

you know,

the blamed

wind and solar.

So is that happening to you?

Is oil and gas, is wind and solar,

are they pushing narratives out about nuclear to

hinder your business?

I think that industries will always sort of jockey against each other and PR firms will always try to find ways to shift blame.

I do think that in the 80s, there's good evidence that the oil and gas industry

funded some of the narratives against nuclear.

I put this in sort of like, I don't call it fair game.

It's not something that I would do, but it's something you should expect in business.

In business, you should expect counter narratives.

But, you know, what's more interesting to me today is like

how much of the physics is inevitable.

Because at the end of the day, you can only lie to people for so long.

And I do think that people have been lied to about nuclear.

And one of the reasons that I'm so excited to be building now is that we're building in the information age, right?

So the fact that you discovered.

that narrative, right, about what was happening in ERCOT is a product of the fact that we live in an age of the internet, right?

So these narratives only last for so long in an age when information travels at the speed of light.

And we all have X and we all have podcasts that we listen to and these sorts of things.

So I think that nuclear has been under this narrative burden coming from rivals and maybe oil and gas a little bit and maybe renewables and just various people who didn't want nuclear to happen.

But the jig is up, right?

You know, I think everybody's starting to recognize that nuclear is the cheapest and the safest and the cleanest form of power on Earth, that it is going to power our future, and also that the demand for energy is so enormous that I think it's kind of pushed away a lot of the competition feeling between the generation sources.

Like, listen, guys, we need to triple the grid, right?

Like, there's no boxing each other out.

If you can get NACAS on faster than I can get nuclear on, power to you, right?

We're all going as fast as we can, and we're still not going to be able to catch up to the actual demand for generation.

So, I think there's a little bit more camaraderie than there was maybe 20, 30 years ago.

You know, also when it comes to the safety of nuclear, I mean, we had talked, I talked about this with Scott Nolan as well.

But, you know, he was talking about you take the

seeds or whatever you call them and you put them in the concrete.

You had just mentioned that.

You know, something that didn't come to my mind when I was interviewing Scott is, you know, what...

What are some things that could happen?

What if, I mean, China's obviously our biggest adversary at this point.

And so what would happen, you know, when you put those seeds or those pellets, pellets into concrete and bury them

when they're obsolete?

Yep.

I mean, what would happen if China were to bomb

whatever facility holds those inert pellets?

Yeah.

So this is one of the things that they look at when they design these casks.

They look at various kinetic events.

They look at impact events and analyze that exact question.

What would happen?

And the short answer is that the amount of energy that you would need to actually cause a dispersal event,

it's like, it's way more worth it to bomb something else, right?

The outcome of that's like, yes,

you could put such a strong kinetic there that theoretically, if you kept bombing it, you could get through the concrete and you can get through the containment and then you can get through

the trisoparticle ceramic itself.

And now you've got some fissile product dispersal.

And then you can map how that dispersal works.

And in theory, you can imagine some people getting cancer, and you know, probably not that many, right?

Unless it's like stored in the center of New York City, which is unlikely.

But once you do all that math, you realize, well, with that level of ordinance,

there are a lot more interesting targets to hit, right?

The outcome that you're going to get from that is not at all worth the amount of ordinance that you need to do something like that.

Not trying to give people ideas, but like, that's just not a very highly leveraged use of a terrorist event.

The other thing is, of course, we have lots of safeguards and protections around the nuclear fuel, right?

Not just fences, but like armed security and these sorts of things.

So, yeah, I mean, I think like the

nuclear waste concern has been highly overplayed.

People have played it up to a degree that's just not commensurate with the facts

because it's kind of the easiest target for nuclear, right?

It sounds scary, like, oh, there's nuclear waste and people don't know what that means.

But the fact is, nuclear waste is the safest form of waste of any power generation.

No kidding.

It's the safest.

So

if you look at, you know, I always hesitate to compare nuclear to oil and gas because I have a great deal of affection for oil and gas.

I think that oil and gas has powered the modern world.

We would not be anywhere close to where we are as a civilization without oil and gas.

But it has downsides, right?

We may be be farther if we'd gone with nuclear earlier.

Absolutely.

Absolutely would be farther if we had gone with nuclear earlier.

But still, I have an enormous amount of gratitude for the oil and gas industry for powering humanity to this point.

But we did that with trade-offs, and those trade-offs are known, right?

You are at a much, much higher risk of cancer living near a coal plant than living near a nuclear plant.

That's just fact.

That's just scientific empirical fact.

The reason for that is that coal ash and the types of stuff that you're digging up from underground when you burn it gets into the surrounding environment and can cause cancer, right?

And as a civilization, we have to make these trade-offs.

We have to say, we need power, right?

Power is existential.

If people don't have power, they die during the winter or they die in heat stroke during the summer.

And so you don't get to choose between

zero deaths and zero deaths.

You're choosing between civilizational existence.

or die out and some level of death that is going to happen, right?

And in coal, there's a number in gas there's a number in solar there's a number and actually nuclear has the lowest number nuclear has the fewest deaths per generated power of any form of energy generation so it is simply the safest what would happen if china were to hit your reactors so our reactors in particular

we get a lot of benefit out of two things One is the fact that our reactors are very low power density.

So what does that mean?

It just means per unit volume of our reactors, there's not as much fissile material inside of them.

So we have a lot of benefit out of the box in just that, you know, as a target, it's a low density target, right?

You don't get a lot of bang for your buck.

The other thing is that Triso itself is an extremely, extremely powerful ceramic, right?

So you are, it's interesting,

the strength of a sphere scales inversely with its size.

So what that means is the smaller the sphere, the stronger it is proportionally.

And so you take that to to the limit, and this is a technology that American scientists invented.

The reason they did this is that you can wrap these very, very small beads of uranium, about

the tip of a ballpoint pen, in these extremely strong ceramics.

And proportionally, that ceramic coating around the uranium pellet is actually stronger than a containment dome.

Right, so if you look at a traditional nuclear reactor today, you have these big concrete containment domes, and those domes are built to answer the question you asked, like, what if you dropped a a bomb?

What if you crashed a plane?

These sorts of things.

And so they have these highly engineered, strong concrete domes to try to prevent that.

But we actually build the dome into the fuel with Triso.

So the fuel itself contains all of these tiny domes around them.

And those domes are actually

stronger than a massive engineered concrete dome.

So in some sort of kinetic event,

you are much less likely to have those ceramic spheres bursting, essentially, than

what would happen if you crashed one into an existing nuclear dome.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Thanks for explaining that.

Let's talk about

some of the

ethos of Valor.

Yes.

Valor is a very unique place.

It's very unique in nuclear.

We really fundamentally believe that in order to build nuclear reactors, you need to build nuclear reactors.

This sounds facetious, but it's not.

It sounds exactly like what it sounds like.

There's a philosophy that came from the 50s and 60s, which says that you kind of do a long design period for nuclear reactors, and then you do a long licensing period for nuclear reactors.

And at the end of that, you have a design and a license, and then you hope that somebody comes and buys your design that's stamped by a regulator, and you do a construction project and build it.

The problem with that is that we've stopped building reactors.

And so that system only works if it's something you're doing constantly, right?

It's something that works in steady state.

But if you ever stop, you've lost all of the skills to do that, right?

You've for, you know, the people who were there, you know, have retired or died.

The people who could have done those exact pieces of construction have retired or died.

We don't have the tooling anymore.

So you actually have to build nuclear to build nuclear.

And for us, it means starting very small.

So we start with a very small, very simple, very safe reactor that we can build very quickly.

and we get experience in the hardware.

And we started that really on day zero of hiring the first an engineer in the company.

And we designed what's called a thermal prototype.

So that's what's sitting in Los Angeles today.

It's a thermal prototype is essentially you build a nuclear reactor, but you don't put uranium in it yet.

You put electrical resistors and you can get those electrical resistors up to the same temperature as a nuclear reaction.

So you get to essentially simulate what if this were a real nuclear reactor with electrical heat.

And so that's essentially what we've done.

We did it in one year.

It's the fastest that a thermal prototype has ever been developed.

It's also the most sophisticated thermal prototype ever developed.

It genuinely is a nuclear reactor.

We built a nuclear reactor in one year without putting uranium in it.

And now the next step for the company is to go do it again, but actually put uranium in it and actually turn it on.

And this is going to give us a lot of experience, right?

We're actually going to have split the atom, which is something that not many people can claim.

And then we'll do it again, and we'll do it again.

And that's how this is going to progress.

It's going to progress through real hardware, through real prototypes, through actually splitting atoms.

And you can always get more sophisticated later, but you start very simple, very, very safe, and you get real experience as fast as you can.

How far out are you from splitting an atom?

So the goal today, you know, as set by the president, is July 4th, 2026.

So we're going to try to hit that date.

I'm confident that we're going to hit it.

How do you split an atom?

So nuclear fission is not as complicated as it sounds.

Like I said, it's significantly simpler than a diesel engine.

So here's how it works.

You have nuclear material, which in most cases is uranium-235.

So the 235 isotope of uranium has fewer neutrons than the normal, naturally occurring isotope, which means it's unstable.

And that instability means that when you hit it with a neutron, it will split into fragments.

And that explosion into fragments at the microscope, you know, at the atomic level produces an enormous amount of heat.

The energy of those fragments

is heat, essentially.

Now,

how do you do this, right?

How do you make sure that those neutrons hit those atoms?

Essentially, what you do is that you assemble uranium into a certain pattern with what's called a moderator.

So, a moderator scatters neutrons geometrically.

So, there's sort of a configuration of moderator, which in our case is graphite.

We use pure graphite.

It's essentially crystalline carbon.

and uranium.

And if you configure it the right way, you can model it where if a uranium atom splits, it releases a neutron, and that neutron will hit the graphite, and it'll scatter around, and then it'll eventually hit another uranium atom.

And that uranium atom will split, release two more neutrons, and those will scatter around.

And then hopefully those two will hit uranium.

Those will cause two more splits, and so you have four neutrons, and then eight, and then 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512.

That's an exponential growth function.

So you have an exponential growth of neutrons that are especially more and more neutrons scattering around inside of this graphite core.

And the graphite is responsible for making sure they scatter back in to hit more uranium.

And eventually you have heat production, right?

That neutron production rate goes up and up, and the heat goes up and up.

And so now you have a hot core.

And you can use that heat, right?

So what you do then is you take a fluid.

and you pass it through the core and the fluid gets hot.

And so you have hot fluid coming out of the reactor and you can use that hot fluid for useful things.

You can spin a turbine with it.

You can create hydrogen with it.

You can heat a home if you really wanted to, right?

There's lots of ways you can use that heat.

And so you cool that as you run it through something useful and then it comes back into the reactor and gets heated up again.

So you have essentially a heat loop and you're heating it up with uranium that's undergoing fission in a nuclear core.

Actually mechanically pretty simple, right?

Kind of a stable core of fluid looping through it.

That's basically it.

Another rabbit hole here.

Are you familiar with CERN?

Yes.

What's going on over there?

Lots of conspiracies about this.

Sounds similar to me.

Yeah, CERN is doing particle acceleration.

And

I don't know too much about what they're doing.

I've heard some of the fun conspiracies.

I will say I'm probably less susceptible myself to scientific conspiracy.

I think that

people

feel conspiratorial about scientific topics because it's generally driven by the government and the government has done some sketchy things, right?

The government's done some weird stuff.

And so they see, you know, the lab coats and the government money hidden underground.

And they're like, there's some weird stuff going on there.

I tend to think that there is weird stuff going on in the government that does need to be rooted out, but it's probably less on that sort of like edge science.

And it's probably more.

medical things and you know things having to do with like censorship and social media and and those types of of topics rather than than the scientific to be honest like

American scientists

are very smart but they're very they're really slow at this point you know I would be more impressed with when it's you know CERN's not American but Western scientists let's say that

I would be more impressed if Western scientists at this point were being you know maniacally competent like that would be a deviation from what I think is actually happening which is we're all kind of like wasting time I think most of the scientific apparatus today is like wasting time.

We're kind of pushing paper around instead of doing really, really unique edge research.

And that's because of how it's funded and how the universities are today, which is, you know, they don't like taking risks.

They don't like pushing boundaries.

You have to say the right things.

So I think it's pretty unlikely that we even have the competence to be doing anything too nefarious.

Yeah.

That's good to hear.

Isaiah, let's take another quick break.

When we come back, I want to talk about the size of your reactors, who's interested in them, and a lot of that kind of stuff.

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All right, Isaiah, we're back from the break.

We're getting ready to talk about, you know, the size of these things that you're building.

I want to know how fast you can build them.

And so, you know, I've read, we talked about earlier, 100,000-pound

reactor.

What is a 100,000-pound?

How big is it?

So it's actually pretty easy to visualize.

It's the size of a shipping container, still got its head.

So a 20-foot Iso cube, and it's basically the whole reactor vessel kind of sitting inside that frame.

You can kind of think about this like a big water bottle, right?

It's a

shipping container-sized water bottle, and it's full of nuclear-grade graphite, and we'll put uranium in that eventually.

So just a big old heavy water bottle.

One of the really unique things about our design is how simple it is.

We've tried to keep this as simple as we possibly can.

Complexity means cost.

It means time.

It also means less safety.

So you want to keep things simple, very understandable, easy to manufacture, easy to build.

We'll make that a little bit bigger over time.

So it'll go at least 1.7 times larger, and that'll be a little bit more powerful.

But to start off with, we have essentially one big vessel inside of a container and we have other containers on the side as well, which do other things.

So that's like the main nuclear vessel and then we have a power conversion skid next to it that actually spins a turbine and has the helium flowing through it and that sort of thing.

So we keep it really simple and we try to keep it manufacturable.

That's really the thing that we focused on.

safety and manufacturability.

We want to build these really, really fast.

How big are you going to go?

So this is a good question.

And I I think I am purposefully trying to make sure I don't think I know the answer to it.

I have ideas, but part of the whole point of technology is like you have to discover things by doing them and by getting closer to them.

So I have lots of thoughts on like how big you should build the eventual reactors that power the entire world.

I think that we know that the next reactor we build, the 1.7x scale up of the current one that we have in Los Angeles, is the right size to hit an amazing price, to be able to make the cheapest power in the world and to build them really fast.

So like that's good enough, right?

And we'll start to scale with that.

Over time, I think it's likely that we'll get bigger and better.

But every time you get bigger, you have to,

the safety gets harder, right?

So like you have to pay a lot more attention to what happens in an emergency scenario, how do you get the energy out of the core.

And it gets harder to build.

You have to have more advanced tools.

It's harder to transport, right?

The logistics, you know, get more difficult.

And so we think this size is like a really great way to hit the ground running, put gigawatts of power down onto the grid, power data centers, beat China on AI in the very immediate term.

And then over time, this is similar to SpaceX, right?

Where they start with the Falcon 1, which is a small rocket, and then Falcon 9, and now Starship is this huge rocket.

You want to get bigger over time because you're going to figure out those tool sets which allow you to do that

a little bit at a time.

So it sounds like, and we kind of discussed, I mean, you want a model that's easy to manufacture and get out the door.

Just print these things out.

How fast can you make it?

So it's a good question.

And the reason that we built this thermal prototype was to prove that we can make it really fast.

So this is truly extraordinary what the team has done in the last year.

We have one of the most talented nuclear teams on planet Earth.

They have deep, deep experience in nuclear.

You know, the founding engineering team at Valor had over 90 years of experience with this exact type of nuclear reactor, which is a high-temperature gas reactor.

So unbelievably experienced team, and they have moved very fast.

So we spent about six months in engineering of the reactor.

So this is all on paper, right?

Design, CAD, analysis, this sort of thing.

And then we spent four months fabricating it, assembling it, and commissioning it.

So four months, yes.

Four months, yes.

How fast do you think that will get?

I would like to see us pumping out this model of reactor essentially every two and a half weeks.

And the reason for that two and a half week constraint is it's about as fast as you can get some of the welding procedures.

So you're welding a nuclear pressure vessel, the heads, you know, the body, the flanges, all these different things.

And there's some like serialized

timelines in the welding procedures and heat treating and these sorts of things that are hard to compress below two and a half weeks.

And so what we do instead is we parallelize at that point.

right so we make multiple vessels at once so on a particular site we could be going even faster than you know three and a half weeks, but sort of the time from like one unit start to one unit end

will probably stabilize around three weeks.

Do you think you'll stay in El Segundo?

So South Bay LA, El Segundo, or as we affectionately call it, the Gundo,

is an amazing place to have a highly innovative company, to have access to the best engineers in the world.

Truly the best engineers, the most talented fabricators, machinists live in South Bay Los Angeles, and that's why we're there.

I think over time, you know, the business will operate in many, many different places around the world.

We'll have nuclear reactors operating in many countries and many states, thousands of reactors all around the world.

So I'm not sure exactly where the center of gravity will go, but as long as there are very smart people in South Bay LA that are working for us and that we need access to, it makes sense for us to be there.

How many

is there kind of a limit of, I mean, we had talked about making a chain of these nuclear reactors and putting them all together to create more power for a bigger grid size or whatever you want to call it.

What is the if you thought about what would be the most amount of these that you would connect together for a single

decentralized grid?

I mean, I would put it in the thousands.

I would say we could have thousands of reactors chained together on a single site.

If you look at that total power rating, you're looking at like 50 to 100 gigawatts,

which would be by far the largest electrical generation station on Earth.

But it would actually be similar to some of the larger oil refineries that we have today.

So I think that's sort of the limit because if you build much larger power stations than that, you're vulnerable to attack and that sort of thing.

You don't want to have all that technology centralized.

So it's more of like a, how big is that station compared to all of your other stations?

and compared to all the other generation.

Again, you don't want too much centralization because that makes you vulnerable.

So I think that we will get into thousands.

That puts us into the same class as like the largest oil refineries in the world in terms of continuous energy output.

But if we're also, you know, if we have 15 different sites that are in the thousands, then maybe you go even higher.

There's really not a fundamental limit there.

It's really just how much demand for power is there.

Interesting.

Interesting.

And

you're doing something in space as well, correct?

Not yet.

Not yet.

What do you want to do there?

But I believe that, So first of all,

space and nuclear go well together for a couple of reasons.

One is solar panels, if you're at the level of planet Earth, work great because you have a lot of sunlight and you don't have any shadow and you can get a lot of power.

As you move away from Earth, move away from the sun, solar irradiance becomes weaker and weaker, right?

So if you want to push a

you know, a vessel out to the edges of the solar system or out to you know some of the further planets, you need nuclear.

You have to have nuclear.

The sun's not going to power you that far.

So nuclear for in-space transit is very interesting.

We don't think about in-space transit quite as much yet.

Maybe we will someday, but there's a lot of smart people working on that.

What I'm more interested in is making power on Mars.

So

we want to go to Mars.

I think a lot of people in my generation are very excited about Mars.

We talked a little bit about this before with the frontier, right?

Americans are always looking for a frontier.

And I think a lot of people in my generation see Mars as that frontier, and it's very exciting.

But one of the first things that Mars needs is power.

You need a lot of power.

And it's not just for the local generation.

It's not just to make electricity, to turn on the lights and operate the AC on a Mars base.

It's also to get fuel to come back to Earth.

So when the first starships land,

these are methylox starships.

So that means they have liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

burning in the in the Raptor engines.

And like we talked about before, methane is a hydrocarbon.

right?

So what we're talking about is liquid hydrocarbons powering the rocket to get to Mars.

Now, these rockets are supposed to be reusable, right?

So they're supposed to be able to land on Mars and then come back and get more cargo, and they're supposed to be able to go back and forth.

Well, where do you get the methane from on Mars?

We don't have methane infrastructure there.

We don't have fracking and natural gas and like all the things that we have on Earth that get us methane on Earth.

So what you can do is the same thing that we'll do here on Earth, which is we'll generate hydrocarbons from from nuclear.

And in some ways the challenge is actually easier on Mars.

So for instance the atmosphere is basically CO2.

So we don't have to worry about difficult carbon capture systems.

You're basically just pulling in the atmosphere to get your carbon.

And then the hydrogen is going to come from ice.

So there's lots of ice mixed in the soil on Mars.

And so we can actually process water out of the soil.

We can run that water and that CO2 through the same systems that we use on Earth to generate hydrocarbons, and and we can do it on Mars.

This is super exciting

and also very counterintuitive.

We talked a little bit before about how amazing fissile material is and this rock that has so much power in it.

An interesting thought experiment is to think about, let's say you have a starship that takes off from Earth and gets to Mars, and then it needs to make its own fuel to get back.

The question is, how much uranium do you need to take with you?

on that starship to get back from the surface of Mars to Earth, right?

So you're taking off, you've got a bunch of fuel, and then you have a chunk of uranium to power our nuclear reactors to make the fuel to get you back.

How much uranium do you have to take?

A starship is a huge, huge thing.

It's the largest flying object.

It's basically like a flying skyscraper, right?

So you would imagine you're going to need a lot of uranium.

The answer is actually a cube about this big.

You need a cube of uranium about this large to generate all of the fuel.

to get that starship back to the surface of Earth again.

Wow.

So it's an unbelievably energetic and powerful format for space exploration and for terraforming on Mars.

Where are you going to, when you do these fields of

chained reactors, are they going to be above ground, below ground?

What's that going to look like?

They'll be above ground.

They'll be very simple.

You know, we've already got one unit sitting in L.A.

that we've been testing.

We've taken it up to pressure, up to heat, and been testing all mechanical components.

And essentially, they'll just look like...

bunch of those next to each other out in the desert.

You know, we're starting in Utah.

We've got our first reactor turning on there in the next year, which is is super exciting.

Is it going to be one?

Just one.

And then we'll build another one and we'll build another one and we'll just keep doing that, right?

Off to the races.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Who are some of your customers?

Who's really interested in this?

So I think data centers are like the really obvious screaming need today, right?

We have to beat China on AI.

The Trump administration has made it clear that this is a national security priority for them, that we have to beat China on AI.

So powering data centers is sort of like the really urgent concern.

Beyond that, I'm really excited about advanced manufacturing and reshoring manufacturing to the United States.

If you think about some of the reasons that we exported manufacturing to other countries, one of the big reasons was labor cost, right?

So it's cheaper to get foreign labor to operate these factories.

I think that was a mistake, by the way.

We shouldn't have done that.

We should have found ways to make the manufacturing process cheaper and to do more with less, but this is a decision we made.

When we bring it back, it's going to be more automated, it's going to be more advanced, and it's going to use more power, right?

When you replace sort of hand labor with machines, you're essentially replacing it with energy.

And we need a lot of energy to do that.

And so I'm really excited about how we start to expand these power campuses to make more power and have a factory next door and power the factory to have metals electrolysis next door, right?

So to make magnesium and aluminum through electrolysis.

So, you know, I think these campuses sort of expand into industrials.

We can absolutely make power for the grid.

We can make power for communities around us.

And then the really, really big goal where Valor becomes, I would argue, the most valuable company on earth is when we begin to make liquid fuels.

We begin to make hydrogen, we bond it with CO2, and we can sell diesel, jet fuel, gasoline on the market at a better price than the oil and gas industry can.

And that makes our demand for our product practically infinite, right?

The nice thing about hydrocarbons is that they're a liquid commodity, right?

And there's $4 trillion of demand for them all around the world and we can make a lot of those what about i mean i just feel like there's so many other sectors that would be interested in this other than data centers i mean dod department of defense being one i mean you know me being a seal

working for the contracting for cia i mean

overseas power, especially in the Middle East in poor countries is hard to come by and more fragile than what we have here.

Absolutely.

And so, I mean, I could see, I mean, you're talking about one of those nuclear reactors powering a small city.

I mean, we're talking about FOBS, you know, forward operating bases overseas, very remote.

I mean, is there any DOD interest in

forward deploying these things into forward operating bases?

And even a major air base like Bagram.

I mean, it just seems like.

So this is really one of the most critical capabilities that we could give the American military in the next 10 years is the ability to generate their own power on bases and to generate their own fuel, right?

We want to make JP5.

Most of the military runs on JP5, from generators to APCs to tanks to aircraft run on JP5.

And so we want to be able to make those on a remote site.

You remove a lot of the complex logistics of trying to source that fuel from many different places.

You remove a lot of the casualties as well.

Many of the casualties that come in, you know, for deployed locations come from trying to move fuel around and people driving trucks and these sorts of things.

So if we can make the fuel on site, that's incredibly important.

This was one of the executive orders that came out about a month ago: for the military to set up their own capability to deploy these reactors, like mine, like others, on military basis.

So, we're extremely excited about that.

I do think that, again, this is one of the most critical capabilities that we could give the United States military is to make their own power and to make their own fuel and be energy independent wherever they need to go in the world.

Anybody else?

Anybody else interested?

Other customers?

Yeah.

You know, I think energy is this interesting thing where everybody needs energy, right?

So the customer base is somewhat infinite.

It's an $8 trillion market.

And what we focus on is where can we deliver high impact immediately,

which is AI, manufacturing, and defense.

And then as we begin to make more and more power, we're really just making energy cheaper, which is going to benefit everybody, right?

If you want power in your house, I think in the next 10 to 15 years, the power is going to be cheaper because Valor Atomics is making very cheap reactors and we're powering them and those prices are going to come down.

So, I mean, the goal of Valor generally throughout time is to continuously push the price of energy further and further down.

And I genuinely believe there's no lower limit to that.

Energy can be as cheap as we want it to be.

And you continue to march down that path every year of figuring out how to make it cheaper and cheaper.

And that is going to be very exciting.

How much is one of these reactors?

What's the first one going to go for?

So

I'll tell you what the market pricing is for reactors, and then I'll tell you that we're going to beat that by a lot.

The market pricing is $5,000 to $7,000 a kilowatt.

So if you have, if you want a gigawatt of energy, you're talking about $5,000 to $7 billion

to purchase that gigawatt.

We will significantly beat that price.

So our goal is to be cheaper than everybody else.

I think we'll be more than cheaper than everybody else.

and just to continuously do that year after year.

How long will these reactors last?

We plan around 20 years.

And I say plan around because you design a reactor for a certain time period and you say after that,

you can decommission it or you can reevaluate.

You can inspect it and you say, does this have another 10 years in it?

And you decide yes or no.

You can maybe recommission it for another 10 years or you just decommission it at that point.

So we do our engineering around 20 years.

Now, a lot of the reactors that we have today were originally designed for 20 to 30 years, in some cases 40, and they've ended up running for 60, 70, and some have been licensed to keep going even further than that.

So nuclear is a very long-term technology.

Part of this is the fact that there's not that many moving parts, actually.

They're pretty solid, they're pretty stable, especially our architecture that we use uses helium.

Helium is inert, so we don't have a lot of like chemical reactions and corrosions in the core, that sort of thing.

So I think they'll last a long time, but we plan around 20 years.

Are you working with Scott Nolan at all?

So Scott's working on uranium enrichment, which is extremely important.

We need to be able to enrich more uranium.

We've built our reactors around low-enriched uranium.

So he's working on solving the HALU problem.

So HALU is high SA, low-enriched uranium.

It's essentially uranium-enriched from 5% to 20%, anywhere in that range.

We use below 5%.

And the reason we do that is it exists today, right?

Scott's solving a problem of we just don't have HALU, right?

Russia makes it.

We're not buying it from Russia.

We have some stockpiles, which we're trying to figure out how to make available for test quantities.

But if you need these sort of like advanced types of reactors, you need Halo.

We kept it simple, right?

We just said, let's use what's off the shelf.

Off the shelf is low-energy uranium.

It currently powers 20% of the American energy grid, and there's lots of it.

So we start there.

We can use Halo over time as it becomes available, but we like to keep it simple to begin with.

Do you ever see yourself kind of scaling down to maybe a mini, like a very small reactor?

You see this movement of people that want to live off-grid

and, you know, and be in control of their own energy.

And so what I'm curious about is, you know, somebody that, somebody that's running a farm or that wants to be self-sufficient on energy, not connected to the grid, I mean, is there a world where there's a scaled-down version that's not a shipping container?

It's maybe the size of a,

I have no idea.

A shoebox that can power your individual home.

So a shoebox is about as small as you can get a critical sphere in theory, which means any machinery you add is going to be larger than that.

So there's sort of a minimum size of a nuclear reactor just based on pure physics.

And the physics here is essentially the mean free path of a neutron, meaning as a neutron travels, what is it going to hit?

And can it be reflected back and cause more fission?

And that size is actually like pretty large.

So our reactor that we have in LA, it's sort of one vessel in a shipping container.

That's about as small as you can make a reactor moderated by graphite.

Okay.

And graphite's really nice.

It's a cheap material.

It's abundant.

It's easy to get.

If you want to go smaller than that, you have to start getting into different moderators, and that can get really expensive.

So for instance, beryllium is a moderator that people have used for like outer space where you need a really, really small reactor that fits on a satellite.

The issue with beryllium is, A, it's extremely toxic.

B,

it's

extremely expensive.

It's essentially emeralds.

Beryllium is essentially putting emeralds in your nuclear reactor.

And so, yeah, we think like nuclear is a technology that works really well at the ship a container plus size.

Gotcha.

You can scale out.

Again, it's like bus-sized infrastructure.

And you can do many of them.

You can make tons of power and the power is really cheap.

When you get to small use cases, you're probably looking at using diesel, using solar.

you know, using things that fit in a smaller container.

But yeah, nuclear reactors, they don't like being small, and then you have these safety concerns and you have radiation, that sort of thing.

It's nice to keep them in their own little park.

Okay.

Okay.

You know, back to the, sorry, I have a lot of questions popping in my head right now.

So back to DOD.

I mean, and I know you want to talk about a shift in nuclear policy.

Yes.

But, you know,

how.

Is there a timeline on when DOD will start to utilize these reactors?

I mean, I talked to guys like you quite a bit within the last six months,

just amazing innovators and what you guys are doing.

And time and time and time and time and time again, no matter who I'm talking to, whether it's Palmer or Dino or you or your friend Augustus, I mean, it's always policy that gets in the fucking way of innovation.

And

it's killing us.

I mean, you just said China's built 30 nuclear reactors.

And what are we doing?

What are we doing?

You know, we're bitching about

nonsense.

Yes.

And so, I mean,

is there an actual timeline on when DOD is going to implement this?

Yeah.

Or is this just in discussions?

So I would say in DOD, it's in discussions.

DOD has a project called Pele.

Project Pele is this

shipping container-sized reactor.

They want to turn a test model of this in the dome next year.

And that's a test model.

And hopefully it'll evolve to something that can start deploying on bases.

I would say the problem is no longer in the policy side.

It's now in the engineering side.

But that's only because of the executive orders that President Trump signed a month ago.

I think that genuinely was opening the gate, right?

The gates are now down.

We now have the ability to build.

We can build at speed.

And it's essentially an engineering problem from here.

So I believe that the DOD will buy the units that work, right?

And so we're going to make the units that work and we're going to be able to show them working and they'll be able to purchase them.

But it's hard for governments to purchase things that don't exist.

You know, that's always like this chicken and egg problem where the DOD wants something to exist in theory, but they're not really technologists.

And so there's like this interplay between private corporations that have an idea of a product and the DOD that has capabilities that they need.

And the way that we crack that chicken and egg is that we build a reactor that we know works and that they can purchase.

So we're going to be doing that as fast as we can.

That unit that turns on next year is that first proof point.

So I do hope that we can put assets on military bases in in the next couple of years.

What would you say your biggest hang-up is, specifically?

Hang-up meaning blocker in our path?

Or yeah.

The blocker, I mean, this is an amazing thing to say, and I'm very grateful that this is now something I can say, is now engineering.

The path before us is set by our ability to build the reactor as fast as we can, to build Triso, to put all of these ingredients together, to test the systems, to make sure they're safe, to manufacture them.

This was not true up until about a month ago, which is very, very exciting.

But you have one built.

You have one built.

Yes.

And so

what's the hangup?

It doesn't sound like an engineering problem.

Yeah.

So the question is, what's stopping us from just going and putting uranium in the unit that we have today?

So we need fuel.

That's sort of the next engineering challenge is that we need to put triso fuel into that reactor.

One of the things that Scott talked about on his episode is that we've really underinvested in nuclear fuel.

And this is not enriched uranium that we're talking about now.

It's wrapping that uranium into the triso particle.

So, this is something that we invented in the United States.

So, you'll hear this over and over, right?

A technology we invented here, and then we kind of let it sit on the shelf, and other countries scaled it out.

So, unfortunately, China has the largest triso production capability in the world today, of course.

And it's being set up domestically as well.

So, that's sort of the long lead today:

getting fuel to turn that reactor on.

But I'm excited.

I think that we'll get it on in the next year.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Anything else with policy shift that you want to chat about?

Yeah, it's really interesting.

If you think about where nuclear policy was in the United States from its inception, nuclear policy started as essentially what I would call protectionism, right?

We wanted to protect what we had.

And what we had was essentially a total monopoly on nuclear energy and nuclear technology.

We're the only ones who knew how to do it.

Germany was trying to figure it out.

Britain caught up pretty fast.

The USSR caught up pretty fast.

But in the very earliest days, this was a total American monopoly.

And our first policies around nuclear were built to protect that monopoly and to keep this a sort of like a closely guarded government secret that doesn't get anywhere else in the world.

But as things happened in technology, other people did figure it out, right?

USSR figured it out.

They became very good at building reactors.

China figured it out.

They're now getting very good at building reactors.

And reactors are getting built all over the world.

the new directive from the Trump administration is about dominance.

And I'd say this is a shift from protectionism to dominance.

The new nuclear policy in the United States is that we need to be the best in the world.

We need to be the gold standard of nuclear again.

We need to, that means we need to build fast, we need to build safe, and we need to build reactors that are cost competitive.

They need to be cheaper than whatever China can put in the ground.

And in order to do that, you really need to have an administration that is fully aligned on making that happen.

And that's what I'm so excited about.

There's really never been a better time in the last 40 years to build a nuclear energy, and it would not have happened without the leadership of the president.

He really did put his foot down and say, we are going to be energy dominant.

We are going to sign these orders, which empower the DOE to finally start testing reactors again, which change the NRC to allow us to actually go build them.

And

it's also the people around him as well.

You know, I've noticed that there's just this massive shift from analysis to action, right?

From paper to getting stuff done.

I was hearing the other day that the shift in the feeling of

the shift in attitude is from

what 50 papers did you sign this week to what 50 things did you get done this week, right?

What happened in the physical world?

And that is very exciting to me.

Yeah, me too.

Me too.

We're getting into, we want to talk about the actual cost of how much cheaper is nuclear?

Yeah.

So this is something I think few people understand.

A lot of people when they hear about nuclear energy, what they're thinking about is it's stable, it's clean, you know, you can, it lasts for a long time.

There's these attributes of nuclear that they're thinking about.

And very seldom are you hearing it's just going to be so much cheaper.

And this is really a product of how poorly we've been building nuclear in the West for the last 30 years is that it became very expensive.

And, you know, opponents of nuclear will say, nuclear is, you know, $150 to $200 a megawatt hour, whereas other forms of generation are less than $100.

And so nuclear looks like the expensive option.

I would appeal to the past.

I would say, what was nuclear energy before we kind of mucked it up, right?

Before we over-regulated, before Three Mile Island, before we kind of tripped over our own feet?

What was nuclear doing?

And what's fascinating is that if you go and look at the original costs of nuclear from the 1970s, it was and remains the cheapest energy that humanity has ever experienced.

And that's adjusting for inflation, right?

So if you take what did nuclear energy cost in the early 1970s and adjust those numbers to today, it was around $35 to $40 a megawatt hour, which is cheaper than the cheapest energy on Earth today.

So we've actually gotten more expensive in every way since the early 1970s.

And again, we're not talking about nominal 1970s dollars.

This is inflation adjusted, which proves to me from a physics perspective and an engineering perspective that nuclear can obviously be the cheapest source of energy because we did it before.

We've already proved it.

And so we just have to get back there.

Now, what's also interesting is that even in the early 1970s, that was only, what, 20 years since we even invented nuclear, right?

It was 20 years since we turned on the first reactors.

And so that technology was like pretty new and it was already the cheapest energy on Earth.

So where would we be if we had continued to march down that line?

Where would we be if we had continued to let innovators innovate and make these things cheaper as technology does over time?

And that's what I'm really excited about with Valor.

So the first goal is we're going to get back to energy being, you know, nuclear energy being the cheapest.

And then we're going to go further.

It's going to get cheaper and cheaper.

And that's going to be really exciting.

I mean, I think I read that 90% of the cost is lawyers and

all this bureaucracy type shit.

Yeah.

So

absolutely.

I mean, this is one of these things where

when people talk about cost, they're really only able to look at historical examples and they look at how projects have gone and they total up the costs and they say, well, this is how much it costs.

But as technologists, you have to take a step back and look at things more fundamentally.

And you have to ask, how much should things cost and why?

And there's a way of looking at this that I love.

It's something I believe Elon invented.

It's called the IDIAT Index.

Have you heard of this?

No.

So the IDIAT Index is a really fun way to look at technology.

Essentially, what you do is you look at the finished cost of a good, right?

So how much does a thing cost on the shelf?

And then you look at the cost of the materials that it's built out of, and you divide the finished cost number by the material cost number and you get a factor, right?

So for an example, an iPhone costs, let's say, $1,000 and it's probably like 200 bucks of material, right?

So divide that and you get a factor of four.

So that'd be an idiot index of four.

And that's pretty characteristic for like mature projects, mature products, is is they generally have idiot indexes anywhere from like two to seven.

You know, a car is probably one of the lower ones.

If you buy a car for 30K, the material cost in that was somewhere around like 10 to 15K.

So it has an idea index of like two.

So mature technologies end up having an idea index from two to seven.

The reason it's called an idiot index is because if the number is really high, you're an idiot.

Right?

If the number is super, super high, it means that you're doing something wrong.

And the goal of technology is to continue pushing that number lower and lower.

Again, you know, with space as an example, as far as I can tell, when Elon started SpaceX, space in general had an idiot index of about 70, right?

So 70 is an extraordinarily high number.

What that tells you is the rocket that's standing there was 70 times more than the materials it's made out of in terms of cost.

So you're doing something wrong there, right?

It shouldn't cost that much.

Nuclear is about 140.

140?

140.

So nuclear is about two times worse than space was before SpaceX.

And it's, you know, 10 times to 12 times more than it should be for a mature commercial piece of industrial equipment, right?

So that tells us that we have an enormous amount of doing things wrong in the system that we need to solve for.

So then the question is, well, how do you do things right?

And the only way to do things right is to start from first principles.

You have to look at the design and you have to say, how do we make this cheap?

How do we manufacture it easily?

How do we keep it safe?

And the safety has to do with the cost, right?

Because if you have a very safe reactor, you spend a lot less time and energy on engineering safety, right?

A very simple, very safe reactor is easier to make safe than a reactor that's like less safe by design.

And then you end up adding a bunch of safety band-aids on it, let's put it that way.

So just start with something that's much safer, much simpler.

And then the other way that you drive a lower IDIA index is by doing the same thing over and over.

Repetition is really the fundamental way that you drive an India index lower.

This is again why we make the reactors very small and why we have this model of making many of them on a site.

I call this you do well what you do often, right?

So whatever you do over and over again, you're going to do better and better.

And so you want to get into this pattern where you're making the same reactor with the same tools, with the same people, and they get better at it.

And that's what's going to allow us to pull all of that cost out of the system.

And we'll get to cheap reactors, which are more like industrial pieces of equipment, right?

Maybe an index of 10, hopefully get down to seven, maybe even five.

Let's move into China versus the U.S.

with the AI race.

And

before we get into that, I want to ask you about, you know,

espionage.

You know, and I talked to Augustus about this.

I brought up that, you know, when I worked overseas,

China would set up brothels.

Wow.

All over the Middle East.

I could see that, yeah.

And pretty much anywhere the U.S.

was at.

And they would set them up, and you'd get the State Department guys and all these people going in there that are working for NGOs, U.S.AID, State Department,

insert government agency that's operating at some capacity overseas.

And

people go in there, fall in love with the

Chinese spy/slash prostitute.

Next thing you know, they're giving up information.

I told Augustus that at lunch after our interview, and I asked, you know, he goes, man, that sounds exactly like

Silicon Valley and El Segundo.

It sounds like San Francisco, for sure.

You see these guys, they're nerds, they come up, they build something, they get rich, and then they have a super attractive Russian wife or Chinese girlfriend or whatever.

And that wife slash girlfriend is selling secrets back to, you know,

wherever they came from.

I mean, how are you,

are you concerned about that?

And if you are, how are you, you know, how are you taking that, that type of a threat seriously?

Yeah, so first off, I am definitely concerned about that.

I'm especially concerned about that in places where we do have the technological edge today, right?

So I think AI is like a really obvious example where, of course, China is doing that.

Like they would be foolish not to do that.

And we would be foolish to assume that they aren't.

So that is absolutely happening.

There have been known cases of that happening.

So you have to be very careful about it.

The other thing that I'd say today, though, is that, to be honest, we're so far behind in nuclear that China doesn't care to steal anything from us.

They're so far ahead of us.

They've built advanced reactors.

We've never built an advanced reactor on American soil.

We've never split an atom in an advanced reactor on American soil.

And China has in three now, I believe.

And so this is going to be a concern.

And we're thinking about how to address this threat over the next few years as we begin to pull ahead of China.

But to be honest, where it stands today, they're just just ahead of us.

They don't care to steal.

They view what we're building as

toys, essentially, right now, that they're past,

which is a very sad place to be.

And that's why we have this urgency of the moment.

I would say we have a window to catch up.

And the reason we have a window to catch up is because American entrepreneurs are the most innovative people on Earth.

We genuinely are.

We're incredible at building innovative technology, using first principles thinking.

and incredible engineers and building something that's never existed before.

Pretty much everything that China is doing on nuclear is stuff they copied from us, but it's stuff they copied from us back in the 60s and 70s and 80s.

And then they've sort of brought to a new point of maturity through experience since then.

And we're still back there, right?

We're still trying to just get this stuff working.

So it will be a concern as we pull ahead.

But today, like, you know, man, we got to start splitting atoms before they even care.

How far behind do you think we are?

I think today we are probably four or five years behind

if Valor is doing it if other companies are doing it we're decades behind um i think valor is the only company that's moving even close to fast enough to to get anywhere close to china um and and that is something i think about a lot and we're going to go as fast as we possibly can and five years do you see let's let's say

let's say the administrator let's just say you know

after

trump's

term here, you know, goes back to the Democrats.

I mean, are Democrats on board with this at all?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

They are.

You know, I think that nuclear.

This is a bipartisan issue that everybody's taking seriously.

Nuclear became bipartisan during the Biden administration.

Now, I will say, you know, I think obviously there will be another Democratic presidency at some point.

And

my appeal would be that you should take a look at what the president did and

put the partisanship aside.

and keep feeling that fire because it is so important.

It is such a national security issue that we have power, that we power our civilization, that we reshore, that we win on AI.

You know, this should not be a partisan issue.

This should be completely bipartisan.

And it was beginning to be.

I think the Biden administration, more than other Democratic administrations before him,

were pushing nuclear.

They started to make a couple of movements.

The one flaw, I think, in this for Democrats is that they tend to be very protective of bureaucracies, right?

They tend to be protective of the sort of like class of people who are generally Democrats who sit in government positions and have government jobs and do the paperwork.

And I think that, you know, obviously Republicans are a little different from that.

They don't have those same classes of people.

They don't have the same loyalties toward bureaucracies and bureaucratic systems.

And so the Trump administration has been able to very, very quickly change the tone overnight, which is amazing.

And so my appeal to be whoever the next Democratic administration is, whether that's in four years or 12 years or whenever it is, that I would appeal to you to set that aside and understand that we need to build and this is a national security issue and that there are lots and lots of ways that we can use those people to build even more.

There's a certain amount of bureaucrats in government who today, I would say, are sort of governing an empire of dirt, right?

They're governing a whole lot of nothing.

And we have to peel that bureaucracy back to start building again.

But as we start building more and more and more, you're going to need to add people back in because the industry is going to grow and it's going to get bigger and it's going to make more power.

And there will be lots of opportunities for bureaucrats to do the good work that they do in making things safe and checking things out and those sorts of things.

But you have to let the industry.

I've never heard anybody say, let the bureaucrats do the good things that they do ever in my life.

Well,

let me counter this for you for a little bit.

So

one of the things that's very unique

about American culture is that we have had very functional bureaucracies before.

Bureaucracies can do things.

They have a huge failure mode, which we all know now, right?

Which is that they get slow and they don't do anything and they stop progress and they take 10 years to do a single piece of paperwork.

But you can sort of think about some of the great engineering projects of the last hundred years as bureaucratic projects to some extent.

So the Apollo landings, right, landing on the moon, had bureaucrats, right?

There was a lot of paperwork involved in that.

You had a lot of people checking designs, checking document flow, ensuring security,

ensuring, you know, all of the things that go into checking the boxes to make sure that nobody died on the moon, right?

And we had a successful outcome to that mission.

There was an army of people involved in that effort.

And you would call many of those people bureaucrats, lots of engineers too.

And I would say the ratio was a lot better, right?

The ratio of bureaucrats to engineers was a lot better.

But you really do need what I would say is people who dedicate their life to making the machinery of government turn.

And so you do need that, but you need to not let them run the ship, right?

Engineers need to run the ship.

And

I would say administrations need to run the ship.

You need to have an executive who's running the ship.

And those people need to help the president run the ship in the right direction and not become a thing that is purposeful in and of themselves, like the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy.

That's where it gets really bad.

You know, my fear is, I mean, you know, the country is very divided right now.

It has been for

eight,

12 years, you know, maybe longer.

Yeah.

Probably since 9-11.

You know, it's just, it's gotten worse and worse and worse.

And

you see, you know, Democrats come in and they undo everything that the Republicans did.

And you see the Republicans come in and they undo everything that the Democrats did just because

the country's become so tribal.

And so, you know, my question to you is, you know,

a lot of people aren't going to be happy with how things are going in this administration.

Wouldn't be surprised if it flips.

Wouldn't be surprised if that party undoes everything.

You know, the cycle just keeps continuing, right?

And so what my question to you is, are you building relationships with,

I mean, I know right now we have, you know, we have a

Republican-heavy House, we have a Republican-heavy Senate.

Obviously, you know, President's Republican.

Yep.

You know, so if that switch, it might switch, you know, in a year and a half midterms.

You know, are you building relationships with Democrat politicians?

Yep.

Yeah.

And I think the place where this mostly happens is at the state level, right?

So state level and somewhat in Senate and House.

But I think that today Republicans are leading the charge on energy dominance.

And

I would appeal to Democrats.

that when it's their turn again, that they should pick that up and do even better.

Right.

Like that's going to be the charge.

And I think that's how they'll win because energy really is something that's good for the American people and it's good for American interests.

And people want to vote for that.

They want to vote for cheaper prices, for stable power, for security, for manufacturing, for jobs.

All of these things are downstream of energy.

And again, I think

the right sentiment was there,

especially in the last Democratic administration.

Before that, I think previous Democratic administrations were a little bit anti-nuclear.

The Biden administration, I would say, was like pro-nuclear, but not willing to rock the boat.

Now the boat has been rocked, right?

Trump just rocked the boat, and we're charging forward.

And so I think that's a great tee-up for a Democratic administration to push that ball even further and take that win.

So that would be my appeal.

I think that's great.

What I'm asking is, you know, are you developing the relationships that you need for when there is a turnover?

Because there will be a turnover.

You know, and so are you having discussions with

Governor Newsom in your state about this?

Yeah, I would say not so much in California, but in other Democratic states, yes.

California, unfortunately, has a moratorium on nuclear.

And it's, you know, may or may not be repealed.

That would be awesome.

But yeah, I think

there's some shift that's going to have to happen.

And whoever's willing to run forward on that shift, Nevada is a good example.

Washington state is a good example of places where that shift could take place.

Illinois is having a moment where they're trying to figure out if they're going to be pro-nuclear or not.

And so the short answer is yes, but Republicans have the ball today and they're running really fast with it.

So whoever has the ball next and is willing to run with it as fast, I'm going to be very excited to work with.

Well,

I hope you build those relationships.

Thank you.

Yes.

You're going to need them.

Absolutely.

But Isaiah,

kudos to you, man.

Thank you.

Like, amazing what you're doing.

26 years old, dropped out at high school at 16.

I mean, and now you're

building nuclear reactors.

I mean, that is just

really cool, man.

And with your backstory, you know, growing up, nothing came easy on food stamps to who you are today.

I mean,

that's inspiration for an entire generation of people.

Well, thank you so much for having me on.

This has been a really great time.

My pleasure.

Congratulations.

Thank you for seeing you.

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