Isaiah Taylor is the Founder of Valar Atomics.Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor.
Timestamps:
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 States
