My third interview with Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors, Founder of Valar Atomics. 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 Statesshow more

@valaratomics This was a really really good one

@valaratomics I'm going to start measuring progress by how many reactors you build between interviews 😂

@valaratomics I think we should not do this again until Valar tick rate is under 3 months.

@valaratomics Done. Two reactors built in a 90 day period before the next one

YouTube:

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Great show!

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Thank you Casey! Isaiah is one of the few people who got one shotted by Factorio and then decided to just play the game irl

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics LFG 🔥

@CWNazarian @isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Some are saying it’s the greatest lighting of all time

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics LET’S GO!

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics These setups are always world class, good job team

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics There was a very small window between the reactor being built + put in place and the shielding going up around it

@MultiHyphenArt @valaratomics Ti and his team flew in on 48 hrs notice in that tiny window and crushed it

@ti_morse @valaratomics Definition of meeting the moment, all around.

@sthenc @isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Thank you Ti

@relentless @isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Hell yeah

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Wait you mean I have a livestream I have to catch up on AND this interview with Nuclear Jesus??? Wooo!

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Incredible episode, long live Valar

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics The speed at which they’re moving is a huge inspiration for the rest of the industry. Leading by example!

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics so sick!

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics God bless the relentless

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Glad he and his startup and shooting big at this ambitious problem because it could enable that dream of 10x cheaper energy costs. which would be a magnificent future for us all to live in.

@Isaiah_p_Taylor @ValarAtomics Did you ever hear back from Elon? Was looking forward to that interview.

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics Your saying "July 4th" of what Year, Decade, Century, Millennium????

If what we’ve seen from the companies needing energy the most (data centers) holds true then Isaiah is right, cheap will be their motivating factor what they use for energy. Cheap ass greedy companies are trying to take advantage of any and every city that is ran by people dumb enough, or themselves greedy enough to let them set up shop.

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics You must mean shields before placement!!

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics 0:00 Then ercot and the natgas dicks stopped fucking everybody over dont see it odd

@isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics The bottleneck on nuclear was never the physics. It was treating every design decision like a one-way door — too expensive to test, so nothing got built. First AI cluster running on a reactor. That's the energy constraint solved at the source, not managed at the meter.