Isaiah Taylor is the audacious visionary behind Valar Atomics, an El Segundo based startup on a mission to reinvent atomic energy and fuel the future of mankind. Isaiah Taylor dropped out of high school at 16 to start a business and write software for the world's largest hedge fund, but his real obsession, inherited from his physicist great-grandfather, is nuclear energy. After ten years of obsessive research, Isaiah founded Valar Atomics with a radical plan to reboot the atomic age with mass-manufactured nuclear reactors which can make energy for AI and reverse combustion itself, turning atmospheric CO2 and water into carbon-neutral jet fuel and gasoline cheaper than drilling for oil. In one year, Valar Atomics has already built a 100,000-pound prototype reactor, the first step on their journey to making civilization beautiful again with abundant energy. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://aura.com/srs https://bubsnaturals.com – USE CODE SHAWN https://shawnlikesgold.com https://helixsleep.com/srs https://hexclad.com/srs https://ketone.com/srs Visit https://ketone.com/srs for 30% OFF your subscription order https://moinkbox.com/srs https://preparewithshawn.com https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://shopify.com/srs https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. Isaiah Taylor Links: Valar Atomics - https://www.valaratomics.com X - https://x.com/isaiah_p_taylor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
Isaiah Taylor, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here in this incredibly inspiring room. Lots of mementos in here that are sick. So yeah, I'm excited to talk. Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Yeah, so I guess in the past six months, we have really dove into the tech space. And so we got connected through our mutual friend, Augustus Dorico in the Rainmaker. And when he was here, he was telling me all about what you were doing and that you guys were best friends. Yep. And I've been... Really interested in the power grid for a couple of years now. It seems very weak.
Yes, it's a lot of work to do. Yeah, and I think it was Scott Nolan that told me with the data centers and AI and everything that by 2030, AI will be using the exact equivalent of the energy that we all use today in 10 years. So all of our energy grid will be sucked up by 2030.
I think it's either all the energy grid will be sucked up by 2030 or we'll fall behind. We'll fall behind on AI, which I think is unacceptable. This is a red-hot screaming problem that has to be solved. It's a national security issue. I think if you're working in energy, you're working on something really important.
So you're building basic, is it mini nuclear reactors?
That's right. So small modular reactors, the technical term, there's sort of three categories. Micro reactors are 0 to 20 megawatts. SMR, small modular reactors, are 20 to about 300. And then above 300, you're just sort of the classic gigawatt scale large reactors. So we're kind of in the lower range of SMRs. Our first commercial unit will be around 25 megawatts electric. What does that mean?
For somebody like me, that means nothing. Yeah, it's a good question. So a 25 megawatt electric unit will power a small town. So if you want to do, you know, if you want to power a big town, you put several of them next to each other. And this is a common strategy for nuclear. Pretty much every nuclear site doesn't have just one nuclear unit on it has several. Okay.
But we sort of take that to the logical conclusion and we say we don't just build it. Normally it's like four, right? So you have a site, you put like four units on it. We want to have a site and put hundreds of units on it eventually. To start off with, if you want to make a gigawatt, put 40 down. So 40 units next to each other at 25 megawatt electric nameplate is a gigawatt of power.
Now you're powering a big city, or you're powering several towns, several cities, a significant portion of the grid. And when we look at AI demand, we're looking at demand for data centers as large as a gigawatt, which has never happened before. This is a brand new idea of doing a data center that large. We're super excited about it. Wow.
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