YouSaid · the spoken record

Isaiah Taylor

lines on the record: 70
first: 2026-07-02
most recent: 2026-07-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Out AI and robotics that allows us to do. The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it. And to the extent that we can make energy 10 times cheaper and then 10 times cheaper, that is the extent to which we will be able to make basically everything free. And that's very exciting to me because if we're going to go explore the stars and we're going to set up a place for us to live on Mars and explore the universe, we're going to need a lot of stuff. And it's going to need to be a lot cheaper than it is right now. So that's very exciting to me.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A robot picks him up and put onto the next tray and consume energy. And instead, that human will be able to coordinate hundreds of robots, right? So their personal output will go from picking up an object and putting it on to a tray to essentially picking up 100 objects and putting it onto 100 trays. And the trade-off we're making there is that we're increasing the consumption of energy. Now you could still say, okay, but you are consuming physical inputs. What's interesting about that though is let's dig into that. All right. So there were some physical inputs and some machines that went into that factory. Well, where did those come from, right? Those don't grow on trees. Those also came from factories. And you can ask the same question. What went into that factory? It was energy. It was machines. And it was people, right? Apply the same rubric and you realize, okay, actually, it's really just machines and energy. Well, where did those machines come from? If you keep asking this question, what you realize is energy is the fundamental input. When we figure”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An approximation of this will happen. Let me put out a thought experiment for you. So let's take a physical good that's manufactured today, right? Let's take this microphone. So this microphone came from a factory, and the factory had sort of three inputs, right? It had people in the factory that are working on it, assembling things. It had input materials, right? And I would include in those input materials, you know, the plastic on here and this foam thing. Also, the machines, right, that maybe injection molded that plastic. And then the last thing it consumed was energy. So energy is one of the three things that made this. What's interesting is with the introduction of AI, we're actually converting the human input element to energy, right? So instead of a person having to pick something up and put it onto the next tray, right, you're going to have”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a few ideas. First of all, I'm very, very excited about transportation. If you think about the fundamental limits of why is it that I can't go see grandma every week on a plane? 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 than 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, you know, just on a Saturday. It takes 30 minutes and she lives across the country, but you go and visit her on the weekend. I'm very excited about what I would call hyper-techno-industrialism. This is a term I invented for haven't heard it. Yeah. For basically everything becoming free.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Building right now. Every one of these struts that you could see behind us are made of aluminum. There was a time when aluminum was considered a precious metal where kings would literally make jewelry out of aluminum because it was that rare. And the thing that changed it to a literally a structural metal that we'd make buildings out of is energy becoming cheaper, right? We figured out, you know, Charles Hall here in the United States figured out aluminum electrolysis and cheap enough energy means that you can actually just separate that oxide from the aluminum and you can have pure aluminum metal. And that is entirely downstream of energy. So I would say that the standard of living that we enjoyed today is entirely downstream of the fact that we figured out you can make pretty cheap energy with hydrocarbons. Now our goal is not pretty cheap energy. It's insanely cheap energy. And that's going to be unlocked by nuclear. What it will look like, I think, is fundamentally unpredictable.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Energy is the fundamental input to the quality of human life. If you look backward into time and say, how did humanity go from one standard of living to the next? It's always unlocked by cheaper energy, right? So when we went from essentially a solar-powered world, which is what we were in agrarian age, like literally human muscles were solar-powered because you were either eating plants or eating animals and both of those things were essentially chemical energy that is built up by the energy of the sun through photosynthesis. Life was hard, right? Life was really, really hard. When we got into underground hydrocarbons, you had this massive explosion of quality of life, right? Where we have, you know, heat in the winter and we have AC in the summer, where we're able to drive cars to get to the hospital, even really simple things. We're in an aluminum struck.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You will always, I will always have to push and I will always push. And it's because I know that the physics are here, right? I know that energy will be a thousand times cheaper than it is today. I know that nuclear fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. Somebody will do that. And it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's going to be in the future decades or the future centuries because that time is up to us, right? It's up to us how quickly we go down that path, how quickly we make energy more abundant. And that feeds into everything else. So it's highly motivating for us and we are tackling it as fast as we can.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think I've realized there is no autopilot for that. There's no automatic mode that makes a company faster inherently. There are lots of things you can do to set it up for success.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's the hardest thing to replicate. You have to start it from the first day of the company. It has to come from the CEO. And the first five team members have to have it deep in their bones. The first 20 team members have to have it deep in their bones. They have to be trained that when they hire people, they're looking for that and they're in those people's bones. And that's also not enough. Also, once you're in that setup, I have to constantly, and this is really what I do, go around the organization and speed things up. Continuously ask my chief staff's laughing over here because she's seen this happen many times. You know, I go war mode on things, right? So like look around and like, okay, that's going slow. And we will set up a literal war room and I guess not literal war room, but we'll set up a physical war room and we will say, how do we turn a six month timeline into a four-week timeline, right? And maybe we'll hit eight weeks, right? But it's not six months.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. This is one of those things that I think is probably the most irreplaceable attribute of a company is its internal pace. We call it tick rate. That's a sort of a metric that we've designed around going critical in new systems, but you could probably translate that to any industry in software. It's probably something like new continuous integration builds per hour or something like that.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'll be driven by speed, even in that case, right? We'll go to the customers who say, and we want it delivered in a year, right? Not the customers who say, oh, we're thinking about this in three to four years. So really speed and scale. Honestly, if you ask me any question and you keep digging back, you will find speed and scale. Like that really is what nuclear is missing. It's missing its Ford moment. It's Toyota moment. It's SpaceX moment where you have a company that realizes that the actual thing that nuclear is missing is scale deployment. And that's really what we care about. And so the Giga site, and we've got a site here. We're going to build more reactors here. We have a plant. We get to go with conviction, build power. And yes, I'm absolutely confident that Load will follow.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This permit. Exactly. Like, yes, in theory, could we go to a hyperscaler who wants a gigawatt of power in a place? Like, yes, and certainly we will at some point. But we could also just put a gigawatt on the ground, right? And we can do that on our own timing at our own pace. And that pace is going to be faster than anyone else in the world. And then the question flips around, which is if I have a gigawatt of power with land and fiber, is someone going to put a data center there? It's like, yes, absolutely, right? And so, yeah, I think like in the long term, we'll maybe start to do some of these deals where a dedicated customer wants their own gigasite for their hypercluster or something like that.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it comes from a very similar argument that I was making before where I'd watched these startups try to get that deal right for a very long time. And frankly, there are just too many parties. There are like too many people and too many parties”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's complicated. It's nuclear. But it's significantly less complicated than a rocket engine, for example. So, you know, I think this is one of our fundamental edges and advantages is that we're risk on about this. And we have a cap table that's risk-on about this. We are willing to go build reactors on equity balance sheet because that's going to allow us to prove it years ahead of anybody else, right? Where our competitors are still trying to convince fundamentally risk averse financers to finance a project, we will be on our fifth reactor, right? And after five reactors, well, actually now project finance is an option, right? Now debt is an option. But it's only an option once those early backers have put the capital on the ground, demonstrated it, and that becomes an enormous mode that's frankly going to be impossible to beat.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After watching this fail over and over and over in other startups, I came into this company knowing we're not going to do that. One of the unique advantages that the United States has is a risk on equity capital environment, right? And the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is we know the physics works. We know that there's infinite demand. And how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in the United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world, right? That is how Silicon Valley has come to be what it is. That is how venture capital has come to eat as much of finance as it has is that venture capitalists know how to underwrite technical risk. And its execution and it's, you know, when we say tech, we're not talking about physics. We're not talking about science. We're talking about mechanical engineering. We're talking about thermal hydraulics. We're talking about instrumentation, right? Manufacturing methods. These are”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this is actually one of the things that I noticed years before starting the company. The sort of traditional plan for nuclear startup is you try to do some engineering and some design and some customer LOIs, MOUs, and you try to assemble this package. And it's essentially paper, right? But it's a package that's attractive enough to get somebody to come and fund the project. That's the essential plan of all nuclear startups. They want to convince a debt financer or a project financer or something like that to fund their nice paper package of designs and partnerships. I went into this company believing that, and by the way, I believe that that was possible like 10 years ago.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because this is a massive, massive threat to the fact that their $5 million system, we can just make for a couple hundred grand with a team of five engineers. But the more that you look at a nuclear, the more it's like this. Everywhere you look, it's a fake industry that has not been building anything for 40 years. And the little bit that they have been building, they're charging a 100x margin on. But if you just take it from first principles and you have smart people in the room and you're willing to build it yourself, you end up with this and the plant is running.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is just totally anemic and doesn't know how to build anything anymore. By the way, the conclusion to that story is kind of unfortunate, which is that when the vendor realized that we're going to do it ourselves because we just could not get our heads around a two-year timeline, they freaked out and started telling everybody in the industry that we're an unsafe company that's going to kill people because we would dare to do something ourselves that is their special sauce that they're charging the market $5 million for. And if you go to, I don't know if you guys use any of these like investor search platforms where you can like go look up a company and people have done like expert calls, they contacted all of those expert calls companies and volunteered to do an expert call on valor where their CTO. Yeah, their CTO basically went and like ranted about how we're the worst company on earth.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the plan is not in a safe state, it shuts down. And we recorded about $5 million, and we were told it would take about two and a half years to build. And so we said, well, all right, maybe I'd be willing to pay $5 million, but I'm certainly not going to wait two and a half years. And so after having haggled with this vendor for about two months trying to convince him to go faster, we eventually got the team together and said, guys, we're going to have to build our own RPS. We sat down with Joe, who runs instrumentation and control. Awesome guy, Brown dropout, really, really good with electronics. And he brought together five team members and locked ourselves in the conference room. And six weeks later, we had a working RPS. And we spent about $400,000 on it. Everywhere in nuclear is like this. There are totally fake costs from an industry.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it comes from this fundamental mindset that the team has, which is, yes, there are complexities in regulation. Yes, this is hard equipment to manufacture. Yes, it's difficult to do both of those at the same time where you have complex equipment and regulation and construction and rock hunting and pouring concrete and building buildings. But the company that figures out how to do all of that complexity at scale and at pace is going to win. And we're sitting here right now, less than three years from the founding of the company. And I think if you look back at 10 years from now and Valor is worth $500 billion, something like that, you will be able to see that through line where we took the hardest parts of nuclear, right, which is the site, right? And the regulatory and the fuel supply chain and the instrumentation and the shielding and all of these things that everyone tries to outsource. And we said, actually, we're going to become masters of that, right? And we're going to go.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's definitely intersecting with regulatory pain. And like we run at that pain. Like we just run toward gunfire on the most complicated things every time. We're two and a half years, three and a half, you know, three years into this company. And we've done something that no other nuclear startup has ever done, which is make nuclear power.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, but you know, that's not how it works in actuality. There are a lot of these components that are wildly overpriced, that have super constrained supplies, and a fundamental edge that Valor has is that we know we are competent to verticalize any individual piece of that that prevents scale. And once we identify that, we attack it ruthlessly.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there are amazing designs, but not much has actually been physically built. And if you have the muscle as a company to build things in the physical world, if you know how to do fundamental clean sheet design all the way through to prototyping, testing and manufacturing, you have an edge, right, that nobody else has in nuclear today. And so we look at really anything in the stack. And it's not that we want to verticalize everything. We'd prefer that most of the plants commoditize, right? In theory, it'd be great if we could just buy a kit, right? Like if I, if anyone is selling a nuclear reactor kit, I'm a buyer, right? I'm going to go staple it together and I'm going to make energy. And that's great.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A rock finding company Yeah. I mean, this is the secret weapon of valor, and I'm going to give you the secret weapon because I fully believe that no one will be able to copy us in this. We are willing to verticalize anything that is necessary on our path to scale. And we've proven that a couple times in this reactor so far in areas that we were told repeatedly was utterly impossible. And the fact is when a problem is important enough, you can go solve it and you can verticalize it because When a problem is as important as making energy cheap, you can go get the most talented people in the world to come and help you solve that problem, right? You can assemble the brightest minds to tackle it. You can get the best capital formation who helps you go and acquire the resources necessary. And it's really a mindset thing. We've talked to and know many of the most talented nuclear engineers in the world. And what we keep finding over and over is.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think there's just a big gap in mindset between are you serious about scale? And I would also point out that exponential curves are very counterintuitive, right? If you look at the predictions of how many satellites would be in orbit when SpaceX started going, people were like, there's no way they're going to hit the numbers that they're hitting today. And exponentials are just really, really hard for humans to understand. You don't expect people to have this problem solved in 2031. In fact, I would say even 2035, a lot of these companies are still not going to get there because they have the wrong mindset. They're not focused on hardware iteration, hardware execution, building the simplest and safest reactor that allows them to scale. And Valor just demonstrated that we are.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are legitimately a nuclear company because we split atoms, right? But I'm serious we didn't allow ourselves to call ourselves a nuclear startup until we'd split the first atom, right? Because companies are what they do. Before that, we were a company that was planning to split an atom. Now we're a company that has done it 10 to the 20 or so atoms so far. That number will keep going up.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that they've looked at all of these nuclear companies of the past. And again, most of the nuclear industry is a modeling and simulation industry. That's really what it is. Companies are what they do. And so I actually did not allow Valor Atomics to call ourselves a nuclear startup until we”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, you have to tune in while the reactor is running. We'll keep it running for a few days as we continue our final testing. And we'll go through various tests over the next few months.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you actually have to buy it hosted from the reactor. So we take billing in the physical world very seriously. The other thing is, if you're watching this podcast too late, you're not going to be able to see it anymore because once the reactor turns off, the website is directly hosted from there, so it won't be available anymore. So there's some exclusivity to it as well.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've always been asked if we're going to sell merch, and I've always said that we're not going to sell any merch until we've actually split at them.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, on the website, if you go on it right now, we tell you exactly how many atoms of uranium were split in order to deliver that web page to you.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we actually hosted the nuclear website. So depending on when this podcast drops, you'll be able to see it. If you go to nuclearwebsite.com.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we took an NVIDIA Blackwell. Super grateful to them for providing assistance to us. And we connected it directly to our nuclear reactor.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I view Valor as having a fundamentally infinite market because if we can figure out how to make energy at one cent, you induce your own demand, right? We begin to imagine ways to do things better with cheaper energy. If you can make it a tenth of a cent, you've induced even more. Yes, it's awesome that we have these tailwinds of customers who are really hungry for power. I think it's also great just from a public awareness perspective where suddenly everyone remembers that power is super important, right? But I also know that fundamentally making energy cheaper is what induces demand for more energy. And that's really going to be our strategy for the next century.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm super grateful for all our partners in the AI space. NVIDIA, of course. We've got a big event that we're talking about today. And we'll talk about that more in a minute, what we did here with Nvidia. But I would like to point out that energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price, right? So if you can reduce the price, you increase the demand. And that will be true about energy forever, right? From now until the end of time, we know that energy is sort of the only scarce thing in the universe, right? It's the only irreversible. In the universe, in terms of a resource. And so if you figure out how to make energy cheaper, you will have demand.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, lots of people from the traditional nuclear world, but those people we filter very, very hard for, do you want to do science? Do you want to write papers? Or do you want to build reactors and turn them on? And the entire Valor team is laser focused on that.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More nuclear experience than any other startup because they've actually turned a plant on. But when they walked in, they had never seen a nuclear reactor before. But what they had done is built hard things in the real world. And so we try to find those people who built hard things. And then within nuclear, I particularly love to find people that started in nuclear because they loved it and they realized it was really slow. And then they left and they're like, screw this, I'm going to go do something interesting. And then they, you know, built a ton of hardware somewhere else. And then I convinced them to come back because I know that they love it. And I'm like, if you come back here, you're going to be able to actually build and actually execute, but in something that I know you love.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To some extent, they all are, right? Because they're highly regulated and we make sure that they're safe. But there are levels to this, right? And it goes back to the previous conversation we had about odds versus consequence. A trisofueled graphite moderated helium-cooled reactor of the geometry that we've built it here is just about as safe as humanity knows how to build a nuclear reactor. And that actually allows us to move faster, right? And that's going to allow us to scale as well. The lower that we can keep that consequence, the greater we're going to be able to scale and the faster we're going to be able to move. The last thing is just the way that we have shaped this team. I have built this team very, very carefully. I am deeply involved in every hiring decision. And we have filtered nuclear as an industry for people with extreme agency. People with extreme biased action. And actually, we have a lot of people from outside nuclear, right? A lot of the people here now have.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the pace is extraordinary. And of course, I'm proud of my team. Of course, I think Valor is the best nuclear company out there. But I would argue empirically we have the highest pace of any nuclear company in the world, and it's not close. And the reason for that is two things. One is we are obsessed with simplicity. We want our designs to be as simple as possible. We would rather have a simpler machine that's easier to build, that we can build at higher scale than a machine that's more efficient, that's more performant. We have ruthlessly deleted complexity, deleted parts, deleted systems where they're not necessary. The other thing is we picked a super safe architecture. And this is, I think, a point that it's hard to tell from the outside because every reactor looks the same from the outside. And every CEO says that the reactor is safe.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was two years and four months from Project Nova for Sam Split to the second time here in this reactor was about seven months. And the goal is to get that window as short as possible. And we will get it down to minutes. This company will get to the point where we have a new reactor turning on every few minutes. And when we do that, if you look at the economics of nuclear, it really is driven by how quickly and cheaply can you produce plants. The uranium is very cheap. The fuel is very cheap. The question is, can you produce plants quickly and cheaply? And that is going to be driven by iteration and by scale, which ultimately is driven by tick rate. So I'm very proud of the team. We've done some enormous incredible things that no other nuclear startup has been able to do yet, but we are nowhere near done. We're very hungry. And we're going to make that tick rate six months and then four and then one and then into the minutes.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. We just turned on number one. So we went critical back in November. That was our first criticality. That was what you would call a cold criticality or critical pile. And just a few days ago, we made power for the first time in our first reactor. So that's the Ward 250 reactor. Obviously, the next goal is go turn on another one. But there's a sort of a success metric here that we talk about in the company, and we call it tick rate. So tick rate is how we judge ourselves and how we judge other people in the nuclear field. Tick rate comes from video games, right? And it's sort of the time in between changes in the game state, right? And for us, what this means is how long from the founding of our company to the first time we split NATO, to the second time to the third time, to the fourth time. And the goal of the companies to get that tick rate as low as possible, right? So our first ever mark from filing in Delaware to first Adam Split.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the problem of nuclear today is the Toyota Camry problem, right? Like, we don't want to make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. And actually, that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world, right? You maybe will get a little bit better performance out of a more complicated reactor, but I'm going to beat you on cost because I'm making a thousand of them. And that's really what we care about. Valor is in the business of making energy 10 times cheaper for humanity. And we want to continue doing that forever. There will always be ways to make energy cheaper and cheaper. And that's very much our goal. And I think the big difference in philosophy is, do you tackle that through building reactors and through iteration? Or do you tackle that through design? And we believe it's entirely a hardware problem.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would make one big division in nuclear companies. And it is people who believe that nuclear is essentially a hardware execution problem and people who believe that it's a design problem. Valor is solidly in the camp that we believe this is a hardware and execution problem. This is really an issue of can you build reactors? Can you turn them on?”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say the helium graphite systems have a lot of natural advantages. And there's basically no chemistry going on other than the bit of moisture that we need to pull out of the graphite blocks. Helium is inert, right? And unlike a water-based reactor where you have, you're very, very carefully trying to make sure you have dry steam, if it's dry steam plant and wet steam is going to start just destroying all of your thermal machinery and everything. Helium is a very, very inert, simple chemical. to work as a working fluid. Now there are downsides to it. It's not very dense. You have to have more pumping power, these sorts of things. But the fundamentals are in our favor in terms of building a very simple plant.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of this design, let's see, helium circulator is one area that people have had trouble with in the past. The heat exchanger between the main helium loop and the secondary power conversion loop is something that Fort Saint Brains has had issues with. I don't know, Jeff, what do you think?”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so our safety basis says, all right, let's look at the reactor design and pretend that everything in it has failed. Are we dosing the workers in the public with radiation? And the answer is no. And that's super, super important because even though we do still try to reduce the odds, we have site security, we make sure that our operators are well trained. We start with the worst case possible scenario where everything has failed and we say, how do we make that safe? And that's really a physics problem. It's really about the geometry of the core, it's about the materials that you use. Triso is a huge part of that. And that's how we pursue safety. So I think that people miss that, A, nuclear is already very safe. But B, the new breed of nuclear is much more focused on just making sure that these plants are intrinsically and inherently safe regardless of odds, right? Regardless of what crazy thing comes out of left field. And that's a much better way to scale.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in fact, it is safe, right? So we have regulatory limits where we say, okay, in an accident scenario, you can't dose the public with radiation, right? That's really ultimately what a nuclear regulator is trying to prevent. You can't dose a public and workers with radiation.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happen, right? Like, just something's going to come out of left field, and you can't predict everything. And so advanced reactors tend to focus on consequence more than odds. Now, we still don't, you know, we still try to protect against things like, you know, we have site security here, for example, right? So someone can't come and compromise the control room. But from an engineering perspective, we also say, well, what if someone did you compromise the control room? How do we still make sure that it's perfectly safe? And so advanced reactors really focus on that second thing. Our safety basis, when we go to the regulator, is everything in the plant has failed. Absolutely everything, right? And we know what happens.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, the only problem with existing nuclear is that I think the existing philosophy, again, it's the safest in the world, but we can do better. And where we'd like to improve is the existing philosophy says, okay, if you look at risk, it's actually composed of two different things, right? It's composed of the odds of the thing happening and the consequence if it does happen. In traditional nuclear has focused on risk reduction by reducing the odds, right? So they say, okay. Yeah, a meltdown could have some bad consequence. So let's make sure that it never, ever, ever happens. And all of the effort into risk reduction goes into low odds of anything ever happening. The alternative way that you can reduce risk is actually just reducing consequence, right? And we would argue that that's a much better way to reduce risk. Odds are stochastic, right? Even if you do an enormous amount of risk reduction on odds and you do all this engineering, something's going to happen.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In particular, there's two big misunderstandings. One is that people generally perceive nuclear as stable cheap baseload, but kind of dangerous with downsides. I think that's just a complete misperception. Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount of deaths, it's even safer than solar, which is very strange. How does someone die from solar? But actually, most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar. And if you add those deaths up, it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world. So that's actually kind of crazy. Nuclear as it is today is already the safest form of energy.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT