Isaiah Taylor

that came from the 50s and 60s, which says that you kind of do a long design period for nuclear reactors, and then you do a long licensing period for nuclear reactors.

And at the end of that, you have a design and a license, and then you hope that somebody comes and buys your design that's stamped by a regulator, and you do a construction project and build it.

The problem with that is that we've stopped building reactors.

And so that system only works if it's something you're doing constantly.

It's something that works in steady state.

But if you ever stop, you've lost all of the skills to do that.

The people who were there have retired or died.

The people who could have done those exact pieces of construction have retired or died.

We don't have the tooling anymore.

So you actually have to build nuclear to build nuclear.

And for us, it means starting very small.

So we start with a very small, very simple, very safe reactor that we can build very quickly and we get experience in the hardware.

And we started that really on day zero of hiring the first engineer in the company.

And we designed what's called a thermal prototype.

So that's what's sitting in Los Angeles today.

It's a thermal prototype is essentially you build a nuclear reactor, but you don't put uranium in it yet.

You put electrical resistors and you can get those electrical resistors up to the same temperature as a nuclear reaction.

So you get to essentially simulate what if this were a real nuclear reactor with electrical heat.

And so that's essentially what we've done.

We did it in one year.