Isaiah Taylor

Part of the whole point of technology is you have to discover things by doing them and by getting closer to them.

So I have lots of thoughts on how big you should build the eventual reactors that power the entire world.

I think that we know that the next reactor we build, the 1.7x scale-up of the current one that we have in Los Angeles, is the right size to hit an amazing price to be able to make the cheapest power in the world and to build them really fast.

So that's good enough, right?

And we'll start to scale with that.

Over time, I think it's likely that we'll get bigger and better.

But every time you get bigger, the safety gets harder.

So you have to pay a lot more attention to what happens in an emergency scenario, how to get the energy out of the core.

And it gets harder to build.

You have to have more advanced tools.

It's harder to transport.

The logistics get more difficult.

And so we think this size is like a really great way to hit the ground running, put gigawatts of power down onto the grid, power data centers, beat China on AI in the very immediate term.

And then over time, this is similar to SpaceX, right, where they start with the Falcon 1, which is a small rocket, and then Falcon 9, and now Starship is this huge rocket.

You want to get bigger over time because you're going to figure out those tool sets which allow you to do that, you know, a little bit at a time.

Just print these things out, stamp them out.

How fast can you make it?

So it's a good question.

And the reason that we built this thermal prototype was to prove that we can make it really fast.

so this is truly extraordinary what the team has done in the last year we have one of the most talented nuclear teams on planet earth they have deep deep experience in nuclear you know the the founding engineering team at valor had over 90 years of experience with this exact type of nuclear reactor which is a high temperature gas reactor so unbelievably experienced team and they have moved very fast so we spent about six months in engineering of the reactor so this was all on paper right design cad analysis this sort of thing