Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors

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.

@CJHandmer I hope I was not rude about it! 😬

I once advised @isaiah_p_taylor that a nuclear start up would definitely waste his talents. "Cool I'm doing it anyway."

Another way to say this is that cheap, fungible energy is common to all tech trees. We’re tackling it head on at Valar Atomics. That’s why I believe we’re building one of the most important companies of the century.

Every physical product is made of only three things: Intelligence, Dexterity, and Energy. Intelligence: know how to transform matter into something useful. Dexterity: actually do the transformation. But energy is needed for both. In the limit, it’s the only *universal* cost.

@jimbelosic @Maddoxxfmr Maddox rocks

Transformers that are in-stock AND a listed price? Thank you @Maddoxxfmr

My third interview with @Isaiah_p_Taylor, Founder of @ValarAtomics. Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor. 0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem 2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 10 4:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors 7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding 10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers 11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear 16:02 Becoming a nuclear company 18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself 21:55 Obsessing over critical path 24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple 30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed 30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate 35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari 38:07 Running through 1-way doors 41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat 46:13 Wartime mode 48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things 51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies 56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper 58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs 1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors 1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale 1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb 1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces 1:20:55 Inevitable time 1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks 1:28:08 Scaling 1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States

@JosephLillard_ “Ward250 is critical” - Ben Jacobs, into that badass microphone

Last one is currently used for PA at our Nuclear Reactor

@connorkapoor Erebor is great

@peonyenjoyer This implies you’re carrying fluorine with you The idea with Li-Air is that you don’t need to carry O2 with you at he start Also Jet A is ~12kWh/kg before conversion losses; perhaps your figure is including losses but in that case you should apply to LiF side as well

@isaiah_p_taylor You worded this strangely, its very obvious that diatomic oxygen is not the strongest elemental oxidant. Tripropellant systems have problems with components being in the correct state. If I am incorrect please feel free to correct me.

There is no escaping jet fuel It is truly the pinnacle of chemistry, the best thing to come from the periodic table yet Nobody has yet faced the carbon single bond chain and won

"if you think about the fundamental limits of why is it that I can't go see grandma every week, you know, on a plane, like, why is it just so hard to do? Why is it so expensive? Why is it so complicated? It really just comes down to the fact that we've kind of squeezed as much juice out of jet fuel as we can, right? It's just hard to imagine jet fuel getting 10 times cheaper that it is. today, and it's polluting the environment and all of these different things. If you could make energy 10 times cheaper, then you probably could go visit grandma every other day" Isaiah makes interesting and important point here, If energy really becomes more than 100 times cheaper, then tools we make become cheaper, so does tools that make those tools, (factories) so does tools that make ... and then we are seeing human bottleneck overcome via ai and robotics. It's very hard to estimate the downstream effects in this scenario. I wonder if someone did economic analysis on energy becoming abundant. anyway, I suggest you to go through the last chapter of the interview.

@iz_dmr Amazingly, still worse than jet fuel. The only benefit to N2H2 is that it doesn’t need oxidizer to initially combust

@isaiah_p_taylor Just use hydrazine/triflouride. Don't be a pussy.

@LesbosQuasar My fluid mass yes but not by volume; and often not by mass either when you factor in containers

@isaiah_p_taylor Hydrogen and methane beat it by a long margin in certain applications.

@JoeHChasko @mzjacobson It is carried as the battery is discharged. You land with a full load of Li2O2

@isaiah_p_taylor @mzjacobson It is fake to factor in oxygen. It is supplied from air, not carried.

If successful, lithium-air batteries will kick jet fuel out of the sky and bunker fuel out of the ocean. "Mainstream lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of ~250-270 Wh/kg, while future solid-state alternatives are expected to achieve ~500 Wh/kg. Lithium-air configurations present a theoretical energy density limit of 12,000 Wh/kg, a ceiling that matches the energy capacity of conventional gasoline." CATL eyes 12,000 Wh/kg theoretical limit lithium-air EV battery to end range anxiety interestingengineering.com/energy/catl-12… Air Energy Closes Seed Round to Scale DOE-Validated Solid-State Lithium-Air Battery natlawreview.com/press-releases…

@duncancampbell @mzjacobson It would shrink a lot but still a gap. Modern high bypass turbo fans are 55%+. The 3x number is perfect theoretical efficiency of Li metal + O2 after combination and doesn’t factor for any packaging or efficiency Maybe 2x net?

@isaiah_p_taylor @mzjacobson How much would that 3x difference shrink when you consider efficiency of the engine in each configuration?

@henrymarkarian @mzjacobson Agree on $.01/kWh threshold. That’s the goal

@isaiah_p_taylor @mzjacobson The math doesn't work out mainly on the CO2 side. You need something like <1¢/kWh delivered power to make cost competitive Jet A and it may not even be possible to make cost competitive natgas.

The same way that basically everything is downstream from oil, in the future basically everything will be downstream from fission

@zero_to_seed @zanehengsperger We became the first startup in history to make nuclear power a couple weeks ago, but there is much more work to do. We need to make a few more reactors and get really good at it. That will take 18 months minimum

@isaiah_p_taylor @zanehengsperger What’s the timeline for commercialization?

@zanehengsperger One of the main goals of Valar Atomics is to give America an unfair advantage in the price and abundance of industrial energy.

@aphysicist Guess I’m working on the right thing

i asked some frontier models to make a top 10 list of civilization-level tech we already have but don't build: grok 4.5: - abundant nuclear power through smrs and gen iv reactors - high-speed rail and maglev connecting major cities direct air capture with permanent carbon storage - large-scale desalination powered by nuclear and renewables - solar radiation management through stratospheric aerosols - cultured meat and precision fermentation in industrial bioreactors - space-based solar power beamed back to earth fully autonomous robotaxi fleets replacing human-driven cars - vertical and controlled-environment urban farming asteroid mining and in-space resource utilization 5.6 sol: - abundant clean energy through standardized nuclear and geothermal plants - vastly more housing through zoning reform and factory-built construction - nearly unlimited fresh water through desalination and wastewater recycling - a modern continental power grid through long-distance transmission - industrialized construction through modular components and automated fabrication - fully automated manufacturing through robotics, machine vision, and ai - preventive healthcare through vaccines, screening, and early diagnostics - safer transportation through better road design, automation, and public transit - climate-resilient cities through hardened buildings, drainage, and flood defenses - universal digital access through identity, banking, education, and government services fable: - nuclear power at france's 1970s scale through standardized reactor fleets - large-scale desalination powered by abundant electricity - high-speed rail through dedicated corridors between major city pairs - lights-out factories through robotics and autonomous material handling - hvdc continental grids through long-distance transmission lines - fully automated container ports through robotic cranes and vehicles - factory-built modular housing through off-site manufacturing - nuclear-powered commercial shipping through compact marine reactors - enhanced geothermal through oil and gas drilling technology - cheap urban tunneling through automated and continuous boring gemini pro: - thorium reactors using safer liquid nuclear fuel - phage therapy using viruses to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria - pneumatic waste collection through underground vacuum tubes - district heating and cooling through citywide thermal grids - maglev rail using magnetic levitation at 370+ mph - ocean thermal energy using ocean temperature gradients - nuclear desalination using reactors to produce fresh water - cultured meat grown in industrial bioreactors - enhanced geothermal using deep drilling to access earth heat - underground freight through subterranean cargo tunnels