Transcription
3 months ago became the first startup in human history to build a nuclear core, put fuel in it, and turn it on.
"Director operator, take the RCCS circulation pump to on."
"Understand? Take RCCS circ pump to on."
"That's correct."
"Insert reactor safety key and turn on."
"That's correct."
Currently, nuclear power makes about 6% of global energy generation. That should be 99%. Takes decades to turn on a nuclear reactor, right? That's what everybody believes. So, this reactor is going to make power by July 4th.
"We're 144 days, 6 hours and 43 minutes from our deadline. Um, I think we'll make it with time to spare, but the DOE has authorized 11 teams who are trying to go critical for July the 4th. All 11 could be successful and we still wouldn't be really competition. That said, I think I'd bet on us."
Ladies and gentlemen, Valor Atomics just became the first startup in history to make nuclear electricity. I'm Isaiah Taylor. I am the CEO and founder of Valor Atomics. Valor Atomics is working on creating mass manufacturable nuclear reactors. We're building a very simple, very safe nuclear reactor that we can make thousands of all over the world.
Valor is uh something I've been thinking about for about a decade actually. Really since I was in uh early high school, late middle school is when I decided for the first time that okay, somebody has to go solve this problem. I didn't think that I would make nuclear reactors. I never thought that was something I would do. Nuclear seemed solved, right? It seemed like people kind of had it covered. There were over 70 different types of nuclear reactors that have been built. Nobody was following the approach that you should follow in order to build this which is our first attempt at a nuclear reactor which could be mass manufactured, right? And people were designing for this. They were thinking about it. They were doing analysis. Nobody was building it. And so this is really where Valor has jumped in, you know, both feet getting her hands dirty. We have a reactor standing here. This reactor will be running before July 4th.
What we're looking at today is actually getting the reactor ready to ship. So, we're breaking it down. We're demodularizing it, and we're getting it ready to go and put on a C17, which is really exciting.
"I think this week's a good week. You've probably seen on the floor, we're about to ship our reactor to site. The site is essentially prepared. You know, there's still a little bit of installation going on there, but you know, that means we really are in the final stages of applications and paperwork. You final safety analysis should be going in today. And when that's in, it's a matter of review and uh working with the DOE to get everything squared away."
The operation is called uh Operation Windlord, um which is a nerdy Lord of the Rings reference. In the end of the Lord of the Rings, the uh three eagles go and rescue the hobbits from Mordor and the lead eagle is Guir, the wind lord. This is going to be incredible. Um it'll be the first time that US military has ever done a C17 airlift of a nuclear reactor. This is a capability that the US military has been wanting since the 1960s. There was a project called ML1 which was exactly this. Could you put a nuclear reactor in the back of a plane, fly it to a military base and get power? And uh this is going to be the first time we ever demonstrate an airlift of a nuclear reactor. So it's going to be really really exciting. We have six modules and so we put two of them on each C7 moving this reactor.
I'm Mark Mitchell. I'm the chief nuclear officer at Valor Atomics. I joined Valor about April 2024 and I've been working uh on developing the Ward series reactor since then. Isaiah convinced me to join. He made me an offer I didn't understand. So, I thought, well, you know, this looks fun.
"What was your initial reaction with like this guy making a"
"Oh, yeah. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. No, there's no way. It's like why why would you do this? This is this is the not the craziest idea I've ever heard."
"I don't know. I guess I've always approached things not by how hard are they going to be, but how important are they, right? So, the thing that was going through my head was, well, that sounds like a staggering amount of money, but it's a staggering problem and it's going to be enormously important if we manage to do it and so we'll figure it out. And, you know, we're figuring it out. So, yeah, I think um chasing the things that are extremely important and really impactful end up opening more doors than you'd expect."
Nuclear reactors basically use um efficient reactions where uranium 235 splits apart uh and every time it splits apart it releases energy and we basically establish a self sustaining reaction which is creating heat and energy.
"My name is Joe Lood. I've been working for Valor for a year and 2 months now. I'm our head of instrumentation control electrical and now mechanical. This part here is the frame for I believe it is now the world's highest temperature and highest radiation resistant chain winch which is what our drive unit is. So this contains a big pocket wheel uh spurge gear. A motor sits here 40 unique parts that go into the cat drive unit. Uh and this is what actually pulls the chain up and down and makes our reactor turn on."
"This is one of our graphite bricks right here. Uh this is our one of our moderating and fuel blocks. There's a cutaway here so you can kind of see what we're looking at. There's a few holes drilled into the graphite. Some of these holes go all the way through and some of them are blind holes with a thread at the top. So the blind holes take the fuel compacts. This is our dummy nuclear fuel here. And you put them down to the holes and then you screw in the graphite screw. Very simple. And then these through holes are for pressurized helium to flow through. So the pressurized helium is our working fluid. takes away the heat and we have heat generation from the uranium inside the graphite. So many of these hexagons will be stacked inside of the core that makes up our uh fueled core and then we have other hexagons very similar to this that uh just provide reflection and moderation around the outside. So it's a very very simple mechanical design and it is a passively safe uh walkway safe nuclear reactor."
The big reason to use graphite in a nuclear reactor is that you have very strong negative thermal feedback and very high thermal inertia. And so what that means is you get a very very safe nuclear reactor. And unlike water which as you increase in temperature increasingly the water wants to boil, right? So you eventually have a steam explosion, graphite doesn't behave that way. It's a very very high temperature solid. And then our uh helium working fluid starts a gas and stays a gas. We never have a liquid to gas phase change like in a water-based reactor. We have a noble gas which has a linear relationship between temperature and pressure. And the other nice thing about helium is that it does not become radioactive. So as it passes through a nuclear core, it does not capture neutrons and become radioactive. So it's a much safer, more stable, much simpler design uh for a reactor. And I like to describe this as we're trying to build a Toyota Camry here. We're not trying to build a Ferrari. We're not trying to build a Lamborghini. This is a Toyota Camry of nuclear reactors. It's very safe. It's very simple. and we've really designed it for mass manufacturing scale.
"Over here we have our new graphite machine getting calibrated and getting up and running. You'd see a test block actually being machined there. Graphite is another of those things where we'd love to just buy it and we love to buy uh the machine blocks but uh quick turnaround time is very difficult especially when you're competing with the semiconductor industry on machining graphite. So another case of we need to do something oursel especially for quick and emergency turnarounds. We wanted to turn what is currently a construction problem, which is like really hard to scale, into a manufacturing problem, which is really easy to scale."
"And so what we did is we came up with the modular citadel. So the modular citadel is one of these blocks. So we pre-cast these Legos and we stack them around the reactor. There's two problems with just stacking these blocks around the reactor. Uh the one problem is you will have what are called shine paths. So if you imagine uh let's say like two bricks up next to each other, right? To the human eye, it might look like there's no gap, but the problem is to a gamma ray, there's definitely a huge gap there actually, right? And so that's called a shine path. Gamma will will just slip through any any crack. Another problem is you need some way to tension them. On the top face, there's a sign curve and on the side face. And so basically, when these stack together, there is no shine path for the gamma to flow through, right? And you have to do it on both axes. And you can kind of see how it looks when these two corners join. If you imagine this all getting stacked together, this this cavity right here, this is an exploded view, right? We've sort of like lifted it up. And this cavity here is where the reactor module sits. When you put those all down and you had a gamma source at the center of that, there is no shine path. There's nowhere that the gamut can go that has a straight line. And we're not talking about the fact that the concrete's very close together. It's just geometrically there's there's nowhere for that gamut to go. Now, this is maybe the even cooler part. This is actually a self-tensioning system, meaning the way that these curves interlock with each other"
"with the weight of gravity actually is a self-locking system. So, all you do is stack them. This is in full board production. Um, I think we've created about 40 of these blocks in the last like 3 weeks. Historically, the things that you have been able to get out of a factory are the things that get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper over time. And so, that's really the goal of of this era of nuclear. We've run the reactor on the floor uh with with electric heaters instead of a core and we've run a core without extracting heat and it you know they're indistinguishable from them not running."
"Actually before we begin uh I want to dedicate this moment to three different groups of people. One is the the War 250 team and the entire Valor Thomas team. This has been an unbelievable sprint uh to get to where we are right now. I know we've said that many times over the last week, but it's still totally true. I also want to dedicate this to my wife Sophie. Uh she has been unbelievable in the last uh three years since I started this company. Um I've got four young kids at home and she's been incredible. Um thank you Sophie for letting me go and do something crazy like this. Uh the last thing is my uh grandmother who uh actually got out of cancer surgery today. Um my grandmother uh was born in the secret city and uh her father was wart who this plant is named after. Um and so I'm praying for her that she does well tonight. And uh with that let's begin."
"There is no rod movement. period over time appears to be maintaining positive"
"and counts are increasing."
"I believe the reactor is critical."
"Reactor is critical. I war 250 is critical."
As most of you in the room know, hopefully all of you in the room know, unless just woke up from a nap a few minutes ago, we took W 250 critical. I think it's extraordinary that we have not yet uh as a company reached our third birthday. Our third birthday as a company is uh July 4th. Uh so we're coming up on it. So we're coming uh but today we took the war 250 reactor uh critical before that milestone. Today we also fulfilled executive order 14301 in which the president called for three advanced reactors to split atoms on American soil by July 4th of this year. Valor Atomics stood up to that call and we have just accomplished it. Congratulations everybody.
"This is on behalf of Department of Energy uh to Valor Atomics."
"Thank you."
Power ascension work has already begun and our next goal which has remained the goal since the beginning of the pilot program is to make power in this reactor before July 4th and that's what we're going to go do next. Thank you.
There's one more thing that I want to show you before we leave. We actually made a website just for this and you can actually go to it right now. Open your phones and go to nuclearite.com.
"Is it working for anybody else?"
"No, it's not working. Wait, what is that?"
"It's an Nvidia Blackwell loaded with the website ready to go."
"Okay, that's sick. But like what's the problem? Why isn't it turning on?"
"The problem is power. How are we going to power this thing?"
"I have an idea."
"Senior reactor operator. I think a thousand people in there waiting for this thing to turn on. Can I power this?"
"Yeah. All right. So, you're going to connect it to the reactor electric outlet on the north wall of the server room."
"Reactor operator. Raise power to 37% full power."
"Understand? Raise power to 37% full power."
"That's correct."
Ladies and gentlemen, Valor Atomics just became the first startup in history to make nuclear electricity right here. Nothing that you just saw was faked and pre-recorded. That tag is creating the electrical current which is right now powering Nvidia's Blackwell chip which is currently serving this website. Not only is this the first ever nuclear electricity made by a startup, it's the first meeting of advanced nuclear and artificial intelligence. What you just witnessed is the first meeting of two technologies which will define the next century. And we're proud to stand with Nvidia at the forefront of it.
Now, nuclear hopefully is very boring. The the goal of nuclear is for it to be very very boring. It sits there and it makes power. Um and so that's that's our goal. A year from July 4th, I hope we have several reactors running. 10 years from July 4th, I hope that we have many, many gigawatts deployed and are deploying many, many gigawatts more. And in the long term of the business, we really should make most of the world's energy. I mean, nuclear is the cheapest way to make power. There's an enormous amount of demand for it. The more power we make, the cheaper it should get, and there's no limit to that scale other than our ability just to continue executing. So, we intend to make most of the world's power.
Thank you so much for watching this episode of S3. Valer was an absolutely incredible company to feature and I'm very very proud of this episode. We're in a car right now because we're actually
"we're on a shoot."
"We are on the side of the country. If I flip the camera around, you're actually able to see which company we're at. I'm not going to. So, it's a little surprise, but uh we did get a chance to film with an incredible company with a future episode. So, Jason and Isaiah have been actually working on this episode for over 3 years. Back when Jason first met Isaiah on X when Isaiah announced Valor on an Apple note with a midjourney render, Isaiah was like, "No, let's let's hold off on our episode until we have actual real hardware to show." And here we are 3 years later and they went critical and are producing actual electric power."
Documenting Valor was so incredible meeting the team out in Elsa Gundo. Everyone was so warm. One of my favorite parts was meeting Charlotte, their chief of staff. before messaging Isaiah on X. She was a hostage negotiator and witnessing like her demeanor and just really running the show over at Valor was so fun to watch.
"We filmed with Isaiah for the interview and then we needed to go film B-roll. And so then Charlotte was just like, "Okay, like go film your B-roll.""
"And then they just let us walk around the whole factory. And it was so cool just to be a fly on the wall watching the Valor team absolutely hustling. And I think at that point there was still 144 days before they were going critical. they still had time. The absolute worksmanship that they were applying to um that reactor, they were like sculptors building this absolutely beautiful piece and we got to just sort of walk around and be immersed by Valor, their team and the beautiful reactor. And to think that the reactor I was standing a foot from. I think I actually touched the frame of it."
"Let's go."
"I went critical. It's so cool. It actually produced power and is the start of a nuclear renaissance in the United States. Uh and hopefully the start of a very cool future with cheap abundant energy. The energy that they all had was so apparent and it also it's not a surprise that they delivered before the July 4th deadline. Like it did not surprise me at all."
So, all that to say, Valer was an absolutely incredible company to film with and shoot.
"Uh Will is calling our head of head of finance at Story Company. One second."
"Hi, Will."
"Uh-huh. Okay, we went over budget for S3. Okay, so we need a sponsor. Well, it's a good thing that Senut Send is sponsoring this episode."
If you're building anything that requires metal pieces, highquality made in America, and fast, Senuten is a place for you. Actually, when we were filming at Valor, you can see lots of Senkutsen packaging and candy all over the place. So, if it's good enough for nuclear reactors, I think it's good enough for whatever project you're working on.
And if you'd like a discount, check out the link sunutend.com/s3 and tell them we sent you.