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

“This reactor doesn't melt down, not because of operator control, not because of really good engineering, but the physics of the plant make it safe for meltdown.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we held it there, and then we did exactly what we're about to do, which is we turned off all safety systems at once and we watched the plant for two days. And exactly what we had hoped happened, which is that the RCCS panels, which are these water jackets around the core, went into passive circulation mode, meaning the water boils, the steam leaves, it condenses, that removes heat, and you have natural circulation with no moving parts. So zero input from the operators, no moving parts, no electrical control. It's just the geometry of that system that slowly just removes that decay heap over a period of two days. So we're about to demonstrate that right here starting on Friday after 72 hours at full power. So that'll be really exciting demonstration. And it's really the basis of scale, right? If we're going to do this many times, we want to make sure that just from the basic physics.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unnecessary altogether. And that's actually what we're going to demonstrate on Friday. We're going to scram this reactor immediately after we scram, we're actually going to turn off the entire electrical supply to the plant. We're going to turn off the circulator. We're going to turn off the RCCS pump. Every safety system in this plant, we're going to shut off, and we're going to watch what happens. Now, we have a cheat code. We know it's going to happen because we did this in Hawthorne before we had neutrons in it. We ran the plant at full power. with electrical simulators. So we basically have these electrical resistors in the plant at Hawthorne. We put about 15 city blocks worth of LA power into this and got it up the full nuclear temperature suppressors.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have very, very carefully built cooling systems that they continue to run for about 24 hours after shutdown. And they try to build in all these redundancies and make sure that in any circumstance, the cooling systems never, ever, ever fail. And that works pretty well. And nuclear is the safest form of energy ever made, even with sort of that caveat, three mile island, you know, even though it melted down, nobody died, right? Fukushima arguably may be one person died. It's sort of a debate among scientists whether that person died from radiation or not. So even as traditional nuclear is, it's very safe, but we want to do even better. And we want to do better because we are interested in scale. We want to make thousands of reactors, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. And when you're doing that, you really just want it to never, ever melt down for any reason. And so the best way to do that is actually just to make active coexistence.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you have a lot of heat produced because in a nuclear core, you still have about 5% heat production from recently split atoms. So when a reactor is running, you have a bunch of atoms being split. They're producing a ton of energy. And even after the reaction shuts down, you have recently split atoms that are continuing down their decay chains. So this is called decay heat. And decay heat is about 5 to 6 percent of what your continuous power was before you shut down. And in a traditional reactor, the reactor would melt down. If you didn't continue to run the cooling pumps after turning the reactor off. So there's no more fission occurring. You don't have a chain reaction anymore, but you do have this decay heat. And if you were to just sort of let it sit there, that heat would build up and you would have meltdown. That's exactly what happened in Fukushima in three mile island. And so the way that they deal with this in traditional plants.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in a couple of days here, we're going to do a scram. So we're going to press that big red button right there. Big red button scrams a reactor. So it basically drops the rods, right? Dropping the control rods will introduce a lot of boron carbide into the core. When we scram that, rods will drop. Boron carbide enters the core. Boron is a strong neutron absorber. And so there will not be enough neutrons to maintain criticality because the neutron population gets absorbed into the rods. So that'll cause the reaction to stop. In a nuclear reactor, this is getting to the core of like what is valor doing differently? Why do we really believe that the technology that we have here is going to scale? Traditionally, when you scram the reactor in a light water reactor, your work is nowhere near done yet, right? The next really day of operations is incredibly important because when you turn the reactor off in a traditional nuclear reactor, you still have a lot of heat.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is the exact control room in Hawthorne. We literally picked this up, put it on an airplane and fluid here. So, the entirety of the plant, including a control, flew with us on the C17s. First time that's ever been done, which is pretty cool.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“4301, which called for three advanced reactors to go critical on American soil by July 4th. And we built it under Department of Energy authority under that executive order. So, I mean, this is an incredibly exciting time in nuclear. This is really breaking that chicken and egg, right? It's the first time where we've been able to shortcut that problem of how do you get data and we have data now. We're currently, as we're sitting here, making 100 kilowatts, splitting something like 10 to the 17 atoms per second in this reactor behind us. So this is the control room. There's two sections. This is the control half. This door's closed. We have to have senior reactor operators permission to enter here, which we just got. Thank you, Brent. And out here is sort of our observation room.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for testing. And they said, actually, let's split these out. Let's make the NRC in charge of commercial deployment. Let's make the ERDA in charge of testing. And we'll have these two separate agencies. And then two years later, Congress said, actually, we're just going to call the ERDA, the Department of Energy, right, the DOE. But the origin of this agency is testing nuclear reactors. That's what it's for. And everyone sort of forgot this. It's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years, and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has, from a legal perspective, been waiting for an administration to say, hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D. And that's exactly what the Trump administration has done. So the reactor that's behind us here was turned on under an executive order. It was EO-1.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the commercial pathway everyone knows is called the NRC, the nuclear regulatory commission. The NRC is solving for large-scale commercial deployment of mature systems. So, yeah, if you try to do the iteration under the regulator that's concerned with large-scale commercial deployment of mature systems, that's going to be tough, right? You're going to be asked commercial deployment questions when you're just trying to figure out how to bend some steel and get some atom splitting. But there's another pathway, and that pathway is the Department of Energy. So most people don't know this, but the Department of Energy was originally called the ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Agency. And people don't know that because it was only called the ERDA for about two years. There was a little two-year period where it was renamed shortly after, but its origin is actually a spin-out of the Atomic Energy Commission. So where the DOE comes from originally is Congress taking the Atomic Energy Commission, which was one agency responsible for both commercial”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again. Yes There's this chicken and egg that existed for nuclear in the last 20 years where you need data in order to go to the regulator. But in order to go to the regulator with data, you have to have run a plant, right? And so there's this like, okay, how do you get the empirical data? And the way that people tried to solve that was with modeling and simulation, right? So if you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valor, it's mostly a modeling and simulation industry.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's probably not going to look like what it did in the 60s. It's not going to look like civil infrastructure because we're not that good at that anymore. And what we're way better at is producing more complicated and more functional pieces of manufactured equipment. And so you're going to shift from the civil infrastructure way of building to a manufacturing way of building. And I think even though some people did realize that, and this is generally what you'd call SMRs, right, small modular reactors, what was missing is that people did not realize that you're going to have to pursue that model through hardware iteration. And that's really where valor is unique is that, yes, we believe in SMRs, we believe in reactors that are manufactured, but we also know that in order to get there, you have to do it through hardware iteration. You have to turn some plants on. You have to turn on 100 kilowatt reactor like the one behind us. You have to go cold critical like we did in Project Nova. And then you have to take the next steps after that. And it's going to be driven by hardware iteration.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“15, 20 years ago, where suddenly people looked back on that and they said, okay, actually, we do know how to build reactors really safe. Even learnings from that, we've taken and incorporated into new designs. But then there was a second problem, which was once you stop an industry, it's very hard to start it again. And in the intervening time between Three Mile Island and when people gained interest in nuclear again, we also really changed how we built things in the United States. We went from a country that was very good at large-scale civil infrastructure, right? Bridges, roads, huge power plants, dams, highway systems, right? We were really good at large-scale civil infrastructure. And we kind of atrophied at that skill set and we got much better at advanced manufacturing. And so my realization, one of the first realizations I had about this was if you're going to reboot nuclear and you're actually believe in the atomic energy century, which I absolutely do.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we stopped for a pretty simple reason, which is Three Mile Island. So we were building a lot of reactors. We were doing really well. We had a nuclear incident in the Three Mile Island reactor. And in that incident, we essentially lost the ability to cool the reactor. And in traditional light water reactors, you have to always be able to cool them. So if you shut a reactor down in traditional nuclear, you have to keep cooling it even after shutdown. And in this case, the cooling system failed. And so you had core meltdown. Now, nobody died, right? In fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured, and there was no radiation dose to the public, but it was sort of a optics and PR situation that was mismanaged in many, many different ways. And the public became fearful and lost interest in nuclear. Now, I think that actually turned around even like...”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And eventually realizing that no one was going to solve it at the pace and scale that was necessary. And so I started Valor.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went from thinking about nuclear as a totally solved problem, right? Which was my first outside view of the industry. It was like, okay, people know how to build reactors. They're doing fine at it. To suddenly realizing that this was an entirely unsolved problem, that we sort of thought, we solved in the 60s and there was like a good run into the 70s. And then we suddenly stopped. So I came to that realization it was very disorienting for me actually. I suddenly realized it actually remember the afternoon when I was like, wait a minute, did we actually stop building reactors in the 70s? Like, why did nobody tell me that? And really since that moment, I've been like obsessively trying to understand why. And I came to some conclusions about why when I was in high school and I still hold those conclusions today. And then it was a 10-year journey of like waiting for someone to solve the problem, watching every nuclear startup that popped up, trying to figure out if they were going to solve the problem.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have been reluctant to start this company for a long time and eventually did out of sheer frustration that nobody else was working on it with the pace required and understanding the scale that would be required. And I think any problem that you want to work on that's as hard as this, you have to really, really believe in it. And after a certain amount of time, I just realized that I was never going to stop thinking about this. And so I might as well build it. It started for me. My great-grandfather was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were both in the secret city during World War II. And I just grew up thinking about nuclear as this incredible technology. I've always wanted to build thousands of machines. I didn't know which ones I was going to build. It was just very clear to me since I was like six that I was supposed to build thousands of machines.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are making nuclear reactors built for planetary scale. So nuclear fission is kind of an old technology. It's around the 1940s that we really started working on it. And we've built a lot of nuclear reactors, but we've never built them from mass scale. Nuclear's never had its Ford moment or its Tesla moment, if you want to put it that way. And that's what Valoratomics is working on doing. We have nuclear reactors that are more manufactured than constructed. And they're extremely safe. And we think the combination of these two things is going to allow us to scale nuclear fission and make energy 10 times cheaper for humanity. So that's what we're working on.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price. If you can figure out how to make energy cheaper, you will have demand. When SpaceX started going, people were like, there's no way they're going to hit the numbers that they're hitting today. Most of the nuclear industry is a modeling and simulation industry. 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
“Welcome to War 250, first advanced reactor to ever make power by a startup. Did something pretty awesome today, the first ever AI chip powered by a nuclear reactor. First Triso reactor to turn on in over 50 years in the United States.”
2026-07-02 · No Priors · How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT