Isaiah Taylor

People who could lay rebar really well, people who could do mass concrete laying, who could build very large structures, who were super good at large-scale welding.

And those skills and pieces of labor sort of atrophied over the last 50 years, which is unfortunate, but it's true.

And then the other thing is like tooling so we don't have the capacity for like extremely large-scale forging anymore, right?

We're just not good at forging extremely large objects as well as we were so I looked at both of these things and Saw that like okay if you're gonna reboot nuclear today You need to be inside the labor and tool chain that exists which means smaller objects, right?

We're really good at making objects about the size of a bus

If you try to make an object larger than approximately a bus in at least the Western supply chains, you're going to have a really hard time, right?

The tools just don't exist.

You're going to have to be making custom tools.

You're going to have to be using pools of labor, which cost a lot of money.

And like, there just aren't enough people trained.

So that was kind of my first conclusion is like, it's probably going to be a bus sized object.

And then if that's not making enough power, then you just make more of them, right?

And that's very in line with manufacturing.

You want to make the same thing over and over.

That's how you get deep efficiencies.

The second thing that I realized was that the reason that hasn't happened yet is essentially because the regulatory environment has become too restricted for one specific thing, and that is testing.

So the regulatory framework for testing became very onerous and pretty much impossible.

And so people have had these ideas before.

People have thought about like, well, maybe we should try to make reactors smaller.

And there's been a lot of people who have tried that.