Doug Philippone

Thank you. There was real risk that it wouldn’t work live. There were concerns with how the chip would fare being run around with, risk of dropping, risk of boot up taking longer or headless mode failing, etc etc… When we actually did it, it took around 10s longer than we expected for the headless server to boot up; it came to like 3 seconds before I clicked the refresh button on stage 😂 control room was freaking out the whole time thinking something failed We will continue to operate live and transparently. At some point a live demo we do will fail, and that will be ok too. We decided at the very beginning that nuclear was going to have to be a transparent industry in order to make the worlds energy

Today, Valar Atomics became the first nuclear startup to make electricity, and we did it by powering an NVIDIA Spark. This is the first meeting of advanced nuclear and AI; two technologies which will transform the next century. But that’s only the start of our collaboration.

I want to clarify something because I’ve gotten a few questions. Ward 250 is a 100kWt reactor. It is licensed to operate at 100kW thermal power, and peak to 250kW thermal power for up to one day. It is possible that in the future, we will submit a change to our safety basis and push more power out of it—probably a couple MW is easily achievable. The reactor itself is SIZED to 15MW thermal—meaning, the core region is 5m^3, and HTGRs traditionally run at around 3MW/m^3. 5 x 3 = 15. Some HTGRs have run even higher, and there are ideas of how to achieve 6MW/m^3, which would imply 30MW. However, it would be extremely disingenuous of me to talk about this as a 15MW (or 30MW) reactor. It is not. It is a 100kWt reactor. As I am typing this it is currently making 100kWt. Future reactors we’ll make with the same core size but larger cooling systems will make tens of MW, but this one does not. I feel that I should say this because others in the field like to refer to critical assemblies, which as critical assemblies are actually not going to make any power at all, by the theoretical power number that should be achievable by a core of that size. If Valar were to play that game, we would talk about Ward 250 as a 15MW or 30MW reactor. However, Valar does not play that game. You will notice that we did not refer to our Nova Core as a reactor and did not talk about theoretical power output. If you analyze all of our media, we were very careful to never refer to Nova as a reactor or try to characterize power. Why? Because it is a critical assembly built for zero power criticality. In 2018, NASA built a small reactor named KRUSTY on the same machine that we took the Nova core critical on, LANL’s Comet. This was a small Be-moderated reactor with sodium heat pipes and a series of 125W Stirling engines adding to ~1kWe. That is a 1kWe reactor. Nova was built on the exact same machine, and contained a larger volume of fuel. But we did not say anything about theoretical power output or call it a “1kW reactor” or some nonsense. Because despite the Nova core containing coolant channels, there there was no cooling system attached to it. Ward 250 is a 100kWt reactor… because it makes 100kWt. It is making 100kWt right now.

Good morning. Last night at 8:51pm Mountain Time, the Valar Atomics Nuclear Operations team brought Ward 250 to 10kW thermal output. We held this power level throughout the night. This is another historic milestone from the Valar team, marking first nuclear power by a startup.

"A vocal band of Colorado software engineers and venture capitalists are increasingly grumbling that their tech haven in the Rocky Mountains is devolving into the place of their nightmares: California."

Florida Man doing Florida Man things.

10 of the 11 guards weren’t paying attention when the guy with the gun came running at them attempting to kill the president. And the one guy who was watching fired multiple shots from this close without hitting the would be assassin.

What a time to be alive.