How Nuclear Solves the Energy Problem | Valar Atomics' Isaiah Taylor
Josh:
Why is energy the most important resource in the world
Isaiah:
I would actually argue that over time energy is the only resource in the world
Isaiah:
if you think about what we're all doing as as humans we are creating entropy
Isaiah:
as we go throughout the universe,
Isaiah:
and almost anything else that you could come up with i would argue anything
Isaiah:
else you can come up with essentially consumes energy
Isaiah:
right so when we talk about resources natural resources we're trying to find
Isaiah:
things in the ground but there's a lot of stuff in the ground and not only is
Isaiah:
there a lot of stuff in the ground there's stuff on other planets and in asteroids
Isaiah:
and the the universe is is fundamentally limitless as far as we know the actual
Isaiah:
limiting factor in all of these things is how much energy do you have to transform
Isaiah:
the world around you into what you want and you know there's that's the only
Isaiah:
irreversible thing right if you use copper in an electric car you can always use that copper again,
Isaiah:
right but the energy in that electric car will never be used again, right?
Isaiah:
You've created entropy and that's fundamental. So I actually view energy as
Isaiah:
like the only cost in the universe and it's why I focus on it.
Josh:
I love that. So we are focused on getting a lot of energy. We are energy constrained.
Josh:
I'm curious what you think. What does having an abundance of this energy look
Josh:
like? If we do achieve this goal of getting energy costs to near zero,
Josh:
what becomes newly possible? What does the world look like when we actually
Josh:
solve the energy problem?
Isaiah:
So let me put it in terms of what the world looks like now.
Isaiah:
And that that might help us extrapolate a little bit. Right.
Isaiah:
So the this the sort of like history of what the world looks like in society
Isaiah:
is essentially three pillars getting better over time.
Isaiah:
Okay. So the three pillars of any product, any physical good are essentially
Isaiah:
energy, intelligence and dexterity.
Isaiah:
Right. So these these three ingredients that you need to make any physical good.
Isaiah:
Let's take, you know, an iPhone, right? So this iPhone is made of energy,
Isaiah:
intelligence, and dexterity, right? So it's the intelligence of the people at
Isaiah:
Apple who knew how to put it together.
Isaiah:
It's the dexterity of the machines and the, you know, massive CNC fleets and
Isaiah:
Foxconn and, you know, the physical manipulation of matter that went into putting it together.
Isaiah:
And then finally, it's the energy to run those machines, to run the servers
Isaiah:
that are running CAD, you know, even the energy to fuel the designer's brains
Isaiah:
as they eat food, you know, and they go throughout their days.
Isaiah:
So every single thing is made of energy, intelligence, and dexterity.
Isaiah:
And what's interesting right now is that we're getting clear abundance in the
Isaiah:
intelligence and dexterity part, right? So AI, you know, hitting an inflection
Isaiah:
really means that intelligence is becoming somewhat default free.
Isaiah:
Dexterity will also become default free as we get more and more robotics.
Isaiah:
And so what does the world look like when we have abundant energy?
Isaiah:
It's essentially fueling those things in an inflected manner,
Isaiah:
which means everything is free.
Isaiah:
What does it mean when everything's free? Well, it means that like the material
Isaiah:
world is more subject to your imagination, right? It's more limited by what can you imagine?
Isaiah:
Now, we're talking like, you know, somewhat far in the future here,
Isaiah:
but it might be closer than people think it might, you know,
Isaiah:
think it is today because we're so used to a world that's constrained,
Isaiah:
you know, heavily constrained on intelligence primarily.
Isaiah:
You know, the entire physical world around us has been traditionally constrained
Isaiah:
on the intelligence of smart people trying to figure out how to translate what's in our imagination.
Isaiah:
Into the physical world. You know, we might imagine an airplane,
Isaiah:
but then the translation of that airplane into something that can actually fly
Isaiah:
takes an enormous amount of brain power of thousands of smart people,
Isaiah:
and then a lot of dexterity to manipulate the world.
Isaiah:
And as intelligence becomes free, it actually just becomes a function of energy.
Isaiah:
So your ability to get an airplane out of your head becomes how much energy do you have, right?
Isaiah:
This is a world in which, you know, there are lots and lots of robots,
Isaiah:
which are robots, which build other robots, which build other robots,
Isaiah:
robots, which mine materials, which build robots, which mine materials.
Isaiah:
And at the end of the day, energy is the input.
Isaiah:
So what does the world look like when we have abundant energy?
Isaiah:
I mean, I think it looks like a world of imagination, right?
Isaiah:
A world of thinking of amazing things in your mind and watching them happen.
Isaiah:
Now, you can imagine that on planet Earth, that might become a little bit crowded,
Isaiah:
right? We will probably have a lot more things running around and planes flying
Isaiah:
around if we're subject to imagination. And this is where I think space exploration
Isaiah:
becomes very, very interesting.
Isaiah:
And we suddenly reach out and find more places for us to have imagination.
Isaiah:
But we use the space around us, like the physical space around us as somewhat
Isaiah:
of a canvas on which our minds are imagining and discovering and,
Isaiah:
you know, putting things on that canvas. I'm very excited about that.
Isaiah:
I think it's gonna be a lot of fun.
Josh:
I think we definitely share that enthusiasm with you. And I love this term that
Josh:
I've heard a lot being thrown around, which is just too cheap to meter,
Josh:
is what happens when that energy becomes too cheap to meter.
Josh:
I think that's the basis of a lot of this show is what are the downstream effects?
Josh:
What are the second order effects of all of these unlocks happening as a result
Josh:
of energy that's too cheap to meter? So I want to take a step back for a second
Josh:
and just kind of introduce who you are.
Josh:
Isaiah, for the listeners, has a very interesting story. Most people drop out
Josh:
of college and they're like, oh, yeah, I showed them. I'm a college dropout.
Josh:
Isaiah, if I'm correct, I believe you actually left high school.
Josh:
And then you taught yourself to code.
Josh:
And now you're sitting here. And for the listeners at home who aren't listening,
Josh:
Isaiah is sitting in front of a nuclear reactor, in front of their product,
Josh:
in front of hopefully what is the future of energy.
Josh:
So there's this quote that I love from Steve Jobs. It's like,
Josh:
you can't connect the dots looking forward, but you can connect them looking
Josh:
backwards and you have to trust that they'll work out. In your case,
Josh:
it is very clear to me that they worked out. So can you just kind of explain
Josh:
to me how you wound up sitting here in front of this reactor that you built?
Isaiah:
Yeah, it's an interesting story. So yeah, you're absolutely right.
Isaiah:
I dropped out of high school. I actually did attend three months of college.
Isaiah:
I think it was around three months.
Isaiah:
I attended a small liberal arts school for a couple of months while I was working
Isaiah:
80 hour weeks doing software engineering. Didn't last very long.
Isaiah:
I was curious to, you know, to read a lot of, you know, literature,
Isaiah:
and I've always been interested in language.
Isaiah:
And, you know, I kind of realized a few months into it, like I cared a lot more
Isaiah:
about the work that I was doing than, you know, spending my time in a classroom.
Isaiah:
A lot of my time in the classroom was spent like sitting on my laptop coding.
Isaiah:
I was like, okay, I can really only do one of these things well.
Isaiah:
So, you know, education has always been something that's like a fascinating
Isaiah:
thing to me and that I want to do more of.
Isaiah:
But I also am on a mission and I have to fulfill the mission.
Isaiah:
And so that consumes, you know, a lot of my time and energy.
Isaiah:
But how did we get here? How did we get to Ward Zero behind me,
Isaiah:
you know, sitting in front of this amazing machine that the team has built?
Isaiah:
It's essentially been a journey of self-learning, right? So how does anybody
Isaiah:
learn? Well, they read, right? They read and they talk to people.
Isaiah:
If you go to school and you learn nuclear physics, you read,
Isaiah:
you talk to people, you do math, right? That's essentially what you're doing.
Isaiah:
And it turns out that like if you are wildly curious about something that you
Isaiah:
can do that on your own as well. Now, you have to be curious about it.
Isaiah:
I caution people because, you know, sometimes people want to,
Isaiah:
they see, oh, wow, you dropped out of high school, you dropped out of college, it's super cool.
Isaiah:
And I actually recommend that people don't do that unless they are overwhelmingly
Isaiah:
curious about something to the extent that it's going to drive them to try to
Isaiah:
understand it every single day, right?
Isaiah:
If you don't wake up like burning with curiosity about a certain thing that
Isaiah:
you're going to spend your life learning about and building,
Isaiah:
you should probably go to school because the nice thing about school is that
Isaiah:
it pushes you to learn things that you otherwise might not have spent the time to do. right?
Isaiah:
But for those people that have, you know, an itch in their head that cannot
Isaiah:
be scratched anyway, except waking up every single day and working on it,
Isaiah:
you will probably find easier and more efficient ways to, you know,
Isaiah:
access that information and,
Isaiah:
start actually building than going to school. And so that's what I did. I've been.
Isaiah:
Really thinking about this business for about 10, 11 years since I was around 14 or 15.
Isaiah:
You know, I have some family history in nuclear energy that motivated me to
Isaiah:
go and learn about it. And so that's kind of what I did.
Josh:
And I want people to also note that you did this in the pre-AI age where you
Josh:
actually had to go and read books and teach yourself things without all of the
Josh:
additional leverage that we have today.
Isaiah:
You know, that's actually such a great point. And like, man,
Isaiah:
if I had had access to ChatGPT when I was like 14 or 15, that would have been phenomenal.
Isaiah:
I'm so excited for the generation of, you know, students that are growing up
Isaiah:
right now who can like sit on Chappache PT for hours and hours.
Isaiah:
And it's like having a professor talking to you, which is amazing.
Isaiah:
But yeah, you know, I did this back when it was mostly actually trying to read
Isaiah:
PDFs from the Department of Energy and the AEC in the 1960s.
Isaiah:
So I'm at least grew up in the digital
Isaiah:
era where you could find these PDFs online, which I'm grateful for.
David:
It's pretty clear, Isaiah, that nuclear is your answer, the answer that makes
David:
sense to you. Maybe you can walk us through that train of thought as to like
David:
why you are just pilled by nuclear specifically, because, you know,
David:
there's other ways to produce energy.
David:
Solar, I still feel like has like a lot of juice left to squeeze in that whole
David:
industry. You could have gone and solved the solar problem, but you chose nuclear.
David:
Maybe you can just walk us through that choice.
Isaiah:
You know, I obviously had a bias toward nuclear. You know, my great grandfather
Isaiah:
was on the Manhattan Project.
Isaiah:
I've grown up thinking about it, but I would like to believe I was very objective.
Isaiah:
And one of the reasons is that I became anti-nuclear pilled when I was in middle
Isaiah:
school and early high school, because having studied the physics of it and having
Isaiah:
studied the engineering of it, I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world.
Isaiah:
And then I started looking around at the market and the deployment.
Isaiah:
And I realized that the nuclear industry in the West is dead, right?
Isaiah:
It's completely shuttered, it's gone, It's not doing anything.
Isaiah:
And in the journey of trying to understand why I actually became anti nuclear
Isaiah:
pill. And I was like, well, you know, this is an amazing technology,
Isaiah:
but humanity is not ready for it. And it's not happening. And,
Isaiah:
you know, there's these complexities to it, which make it impossible.
Isaiah:
And, and so then I backed up and I said, well, I know that over the next hundred
Isaiah:
years, a society is going to figure out abundant energy, you know,
Isaiah:
and I don't, we don't know which one, right? But one of them is going to.
Isaiah:
And the one that figures out abundant energy is going to have an inflectionary
Isaiah:
moment that, that takes them, you know, stratospheric.
Isaiah:
And I would like that to be us. You know, I would like us to be the ones that, that figure that out.
Isaiah:
And so I actually, you know, backed all the way up to the drawing board and
Isaiah:
I said, what is the best form of energy we could unlock today?
Isaiah:
And I believe I actually started with a very blank neutral slate,
Isaiah:
even a little bit, you know, biased against fission, maybe for personal reasons
Isaiah:
that I, you know, was maybe even salty about it.
Isaiah:
I was like, man, it sucks that the nuclear, you know, it's such a cool technology
Isaiah:
that I have history in, but like, it just didn't work.
Isaiah:
So what is the best form of energy? And that drove me to, to every form of energy generation.
Isaiah:
I really started from first principles and looked at how have you,
Isaiah:
you know, humans gotten energy in the past?
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What are some theoretical ways to get them in the future?
Isaiah:
I looked at solar. I looked at wind, which is a proxy for solar.
Isaiah:
I looked at hydrocarbons, geothermal was really interesting.
Isaiah:
I looked at fission, fusion all across the board.
Isaiah:
At the end of the day, I came to a couple of fundamental conclusions.
Isaiah:
So if you want to make cheap energy, you're going to have a machine that does it, right?
Isaiah:
So there's going to be a machine that's a box and you build the box and energy
Isaiah:
comes out of it, right? So like, that's the fundamental thing that we're talking about here.
Isaiah:
What are the properties of that box? What do you want that box to be like?
Isaiah:
Well, ideally you want the box to be small per power, right?
Isaiah:
So the box is just not that big versus the power that it makes.
Isaiah:
Okay. So then, and the reason that's important, by the way, is like,
Isaiah:
at scale, things generally cost how big they are.
Isaiah:
All right, that's a little bit of a confusing sentence. So I'll say it again.
Isaiah:
At scale, things generally cost their size.
Isaiah:
Okay, so a big thing costs more than a small thing. Okay, 747 costs more than an iPhone.
Isaiah:
And that's a pretty fundamental law. It's hard to break that law.
Isaiah:
You see deviations in things of similar sizes for another reason.
Isaiah:
And that other reason is rate of production.
Isaiah:
Right so there's sort of like two fundamental factors and how much things cost
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how big they are how many of them you make okay so back but the most fundamental
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one is how big is it so an ideal energy machine is quite small.
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And makes a lot of power so then you back up and you say okay well what drives
Isaiah:
the size of an energy machine across all of these different you know types of
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energy generation you have geothermal you have solar you have wind,
Isaiah:
pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground, nuclear, fusion, all these different things.
Isaiah:
And what I did is, you know, you might laugh at this a little bit,
Isaiah:
but I looked at all of the different energy generating machines out there.
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And I said, how big are they?
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And again, it's not total size, but it's how big are they versus the power that they make.
Isaiah:
All right. So what we're talking about here is power density.
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So power density is essentially per cubic meter of machine. How much energy does that thing make?
Isaiah:
And the answer might surprise you. I'll just I'll turn it to you.
Isaiah:
What do you think is the most power dense energy producing machine?
David:
Machine like a physical contraption, a physical gadget that humans make.
Isaiah:
Yep. Physical gadget that humans make or even that they theoretically could
Isaiah:
make. Right. But that makes energy.
David:
I mean, I feel like I'm just not having high context enough to answer this,
David:
but like, I don't know, a dam comes to mind. It's relatively small in the grand
David:
scheme of things versus like a field array of solar panels.
David:
That's my first intuitive answer. I don't know. Josh, what do you think?
Josh:
You mentioned the atomic bomb. I'm thinking, well, that seems like it generates
Josh:
a lot of energy. Maybe not a machine, but probably a pretty high density of energy.
David:
We can't really use that energy though.
Josh:
Does that count?
Isaiah:
We're doing some really, really good exploration here I really like it so hydro
Isaiah:
is not power dense unfortunately hydroelectric dams are frickin enormous they're yeah the three,
Isaiah:
gorgeous dam in China is the largest concrete structure ever built by humans
Isaiah:
on earth all right now it also makes a lot of that test but if you if you actually
Isaiah:
do the cubic meters to power output dams are actually pretty bad and.
Isaiah:
The answer today is actually a jet engine, actually a rocket engine.
Isaiah:
So a hydrocarbon engine is actually the most power dense thing that we've built yet.
Isaiah:
Right. So if you actually look at, you know, a Raptor engine,
Isaiah:
that thing is like it's I haven't done the exact math. It might be in the gigawatts per cubic meter.
Isaiah:
Right. So just insane, insane energy density.
Isaiah:
Now, the problem is hydrocarbons themselves are kind of large.
Isaiah:
Right. So like the actual mass of the fuel you have to include in that calculation.
Isaiah:
And then you have to also include in the calculation the machinery that produces
Isaiah:
the fuel, the machinery that finds the fuel, that drills for it,
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that refines for it, that transports it, that stores it, puts it in the tank.
Isaiah:
So once you do all that math, even though a rocket engine or jet engine is the
Isaiah:
most energy dense thing we built yet, the apparatus to source the hydrocarbons
Isaiah:
is actually large. So high baggage.
Isaiah:
High baggage and just more physical machinery, right? It adds to the total,
Isaiah:
you know, cubic meters per output power.
Isaiah:
And again, that adds to cost, right? Cubic meterage of machinery adds to cost.
Isaiah:
And so now the atomic bomb is actually the right answer, right?
Isaiah:
So if you actually think about what produces a ton of energy in a very small
Isaiah:
box, you know, an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb is that answer, right?
Isaiah:
That you have put an enormous amount of energy into a very, very tiny frame.
Isaiah:
Now, obviously, the second thing you said was, well, you can't use that energy.
David:
Right? It's not productive energy,
Isaiah:
Yeah. Yeah, it's too much to be productive. But what this tells you is that
Isaiah:
fission, and fusion, but we'll talk about that in a second.
Isaiah:
Fission is actually as close as we've figured out how to get so far,
Isaiah:
to this like almost infinite power source in a box of a of an abstract size
Isaiah:
right and it turns out for for fission that the size of the box is not super
Isaiah:
correlated with the power output,
Isaiah:
right so like the reason that we make you know you know fusion machines or fission
Isaiah:
machine machines of a certain size,
Isaiah:
honestly has more to do with safety than it has to do with like total power
Isaiah:
that you can get out of the box right you know the reason that we make things
Isaiah:
bigger or smaller in the fission world has to do with how safe we want to make
Isaiah:
them right because you you take this to the fundamental limit,
Isaiah:
and uh you know you have a bomb right which is an enormous amount of energy
Isaiah:
in a very small box but it's unsafe and then you go the exact opposite direction
Isaiah:
which would be something like the machine behind me which is very very safe
Isaiah:
and it's much lower power density,
Isaiah:
so this is actually the key to why I believe that fission is the answer for the future.
Isaiah:
And it's that the constraints around how big that box is really has to do with
Isaiah:
our ability to engineer it to be safe, right?
Isaiah:
It's actually not constrained by physics. You can make a nearly infinite energy
Isaiah:
producing box of almost any size with nuclear fission beyond a certain minimum.
Isaiah:
There's sort of a minimum size, but around that minimum size,
Isaiah:
like you can make a box and makes the power of the entire world.
Isaiah:
And then everything from that point to practicality is a matter of essentially safety engineering.
Isaiah:
Okay, so what this means, and by the way, like the fundamental reasons for this
Isaiah:
is that uranium itself is just unbelievably energy dense, right?
Isaiah:
So the kilowatt hours per kilogram on uranium is about 23 million kilowatt hours
Isaiah:
per kilogram versus, I'm going to get this number wrong, but I think it's somewhere
Isaiah:
around 40 or 50 kilowatt hours per kilogram.
Isaiah:
In oil and gas, right, in a hydrocarbon fuel. And so you have literally millions
Isaiah:
of times more energy density in fission.
Isaiah:
Now, take this to like something like solar, right?
Isaiah:
What's the power density of solar? Another way you can think about this is,
Isaiah:
here's a trick question. What's bigger, a nuclear reactor or a solar panel?
Josh:
I would guess solar by a couple of orders of magnitude.
David:
Yeah.
Isaiah:
Yeah. So it's a trick question because you're like, well, a solar panel is this
Isaiah:
big, you know and the nuclear reactor is that big so clearly the nuclear reactor
Isaiah:
is bigger but but it's actually not true the solar panel is much bigger right per power output
Isaiah:
and the answer is a couple orders of magnitude maybe three orders of magnitude
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it's hard to predict in the limit but today at least you know solar is is about
Isaiah:
three orders of magnitude bigger in terms of physical mass than than nuclear,
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so if our north star is that a you know an energy machine ought to be small
Isaiah:
because small things are cheap, nuclear is the solution, right?
Isaiah:
So this was sort of my conclusion on all of this, like first principles thinking
Isaiah:
and research is essentially that fission will create the cheapest energy on
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earth if we can figure out how to do it safely,
Isaiah:
and we can figure out how to do it legally and in a way that the public will be happy with.
Isaiah:
Because even if you have a safe machine and the public thinks it's not a safe
Isaiah:
machine, you still haven't really solved the fundamental problem,
Isaiah:
at least in a short time frame.
Isaiah:
So the second conclusion that I had, and this is really what led to starting
Isaiah:
Valor, is that if you really want to make the cheapest energy on Earth,
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you're going to do nuclear fission.
Isaiah:
But you're going to do it pretty differently than how it's been done before.
Isaiah:
And specifically, you want to do it kind of in the middle of nowhere,
Isaiah:
where you have sort of a safe operating place for fission.
Isaiah:
You know, out in the desert, out in the middle of nowhere, with as many safety
Isaiah:
constraints as you want to put around that, as much security as you want to put around that.
Isaiah:
And you can simply build many, many nuclear reactors. Because again,
Isaiah:
there's two governing principles in how much a thing costs.
Isaiah:
How big is it? And how many you make? So we know that fission wins the smallness
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thing, right? Very small machine makes a ton of power.
Isaiah:
The second is how many you make. And so these are the two fundamental,
Isaiah:
you know, decisions that went into starting this company is that we're going
Isaiah:
to make fission reactors because they're small.
Isaiah:
And we're going to make a lot of them because making many of a thing makes it
Isaiah:
very cheap. And so that's essentially what we're doing here.
Isaiah:
We're making many, many nuclear reactors out in the middle of nowhere.
Isaiah:
They're fission reactors. So they're very power dense. And we're going to make
Isaiah:
the cheapest energy in the world.
David:
I feel inside of your answer, I feel like there's just a lot of work being done
David:
with the idea that there's just not a lot of like extra baggage going around
David:
the production of energy.
David:
So we could go and we could talk about building a dam or setting up arrays of
David:
solar panels or wind farms.
David:
And we I think you would just like dismantle each one of those things talking
David:
about the supply chains that are required to produce those things,
David:
the third party vendors that are required, the assembly that's required.
David:
And I'm getting the intuition here that building a nuclear reactor,
David:
what you're doing, there's just a lot fewer moving parts.
David:
And it's just a more just like simple environment to produce energy.
David:
And so you have less dependencies on third-party manufacturers.
David:
You have just overall less dependencies, generally speaking.
David:
And that allows you to, in theory, kind of scale out that operation and scale
David:
out energy production, generally speaking.
Isaiah:
Yeah, that's absolutely true for a lot of industries. It's absolutely true for oil and gas.
Isaiah:
It's almost impossible today to completely verticalize an oil and gas company
Isaiah:
because the source of your oil continues to shift.
Isaiah:
And so unless you're in the continuous real estate business where you are constantly
Isaiah:
buying new patches of land, exploring them, drilling, pumping oil...
Isaiah:
You know, moving it to refinery, which you own, refining it,
Isaiah:
moving it through logistics that you own to the end user site.
Isaiah:
That's an enormously complicated supply chain to own yourself.
Isaiah:
Now, what is verticalizing nuclear look like? Well, it looks like having a patch
Isaiah:
of land where steel comes in and graphite comes in and energy comes out and
Isaiah:
a bit of uranium, right? But the uranium part of that is actually shockingly small in terms of mass.
David:
A little uranium goes a long way.
Isaiah:
A little bit of uranium goes a hell of a long way. So now solar,
Isaiah:
you can make an argument about this as well. You could say that you have this
Isaiah:
solar plant, which is similarly structured, which has silicon coming in and
Isaiah:
aluminum coming in, and you have power coming out.
Isaiah:
Now, the problem with that is just the mass constraint, right?
Isaiah:
You're going to need a couple orders of magnitude, more silicon,
Isaiah:
more aluminum, then I need steel and graphite and uranium, right?
Isaiah:
So at the limit, I say I win that fight just in the fact that I need literally
Isaiah:
a thousand times less physical material per output power.
Isaiah:
And in the limit, things cost how big they are. So this is sort of the math,
Isaiah:
for solar. Now, fusion is an interesting part of this as well.
Isaiah:
People will say, well, okay, fusion is even more power dense,
Isaiah:
right? Because deuterium versus uranium or tritium are even more power density per kilogram.
Isaiah:
The problem with that is that, again, it's more about the properties of the
Isaiah:
box than it is the properties of the fuel, right?
Isaiah:
Let's characterize a fusion box. How good is that thing on the metrics that we talked about, right?
Isaiah:
An energy box should be small. That's the first most important thing.
Isaiah:
I would say there's two other sub attributes as well as that.
Isaiah:
They should be simple and made of common materials, right? Small,
Isaiah:
simple, common materials.
Isaiah:
Interestingly, fusion is worse on all three of those than fission,
Isaiah:
Right. So a fusion machine is actually larger per power because it's harder
Isaiah:
to capture the energy out of it.
Isaiah:
It's harder to create the conditions for fusion. It's hard to capture the output energy.
Isaiah:
So the machine itself is actually larger per power than a fission machine.
Isaiah:
It's lower power density.
Isaiah:
It's also much more complex, right? And complexity is a factor to cost.
Isaiah:
And the materials are much less common, right? So you can't make a fusion machine
Isaiah:
out of steel and carbon, right?
Isaiah:
Which is essentially what this machine behind us is made out of.
Isaiah:
And so, you know, like I said, I would like to believe I was objective in this.
Isaiah:
I did not know what the answer was going to be. I thought it might have been
Isaiah:
solar. I thought it was, you know, I actually thought geothermal for a while
Isaiah:
might have been the answer.
Isaiah:
But when you actually go to how does humanity have civilizational,
Isaiah:
you know, energy that is 10 times cheaper than it is today.
Isaiah:
The only answer that I see to that is nuclear fission.
David:
Why do you think that this is ready for society right now?
David:
Nuclear as a conversation goes back before I was born, before all of us were
David:
born. It's been around for a while.
David:
Why now? What's changed with technology? What's changed with politics or just
David:
the world around? How has the environment changed to make the question of right now be relevant?
Isaiah:
So I think that,
Isaiah:
we made a trade-off in the 70s and 80s that made us think that energy wasn't
Isaiah:
that important for a while.
Isaiah:
And that's one of the fundamental reasons. There's a couple fundamental reasons.
Isaiah:
So in the 70s and 80s in the West, we essentially became a society that imagined
Isaiah:
it could be somewhat decoupled from the price of energy.
Isaiah:
And the essential way that we did that is we exported physical industry to other
Isaiah:
places, right? So energy really, really matters for physical industry before AI.
Isaiah:
Now energy matters even for bits, right? But before AI, energy was really,
Isaiah:
really important to physical industry.
Isaiah:
And we went through this motion of essentially moving all physical industry to other places.
Isaiah:
And so it didn't matter to us. It didn't impact us as directly to have more expensive energy.
Isaiah:
And so I would say there's a period of irrationality in how we thought about
Isaiah:
energy because we thought it didn't matter.
Isaiah:
Now, it turns out that you You actually really need physical industry as a country,
Isaiah:
right? A nation needs to be able to build things. And in fact,
Isaiah:
I would say the fundamental thing that an economy does is building things.
Isaiah:
But the flaw in our thinking came from the fact that there are actually two
Isaiah:
things involved in making things. There's the knowing how to make them,
Isaiah:
and then there's the making them.
Isaiah:
And we imagined for a period of 30 years or so that we could be the country
Isaiah:
that knows how to make things and that other countries could be the ones that do the making.
Isaiah:
And in the short term, that looks really attractive because you get a ton of,
Isaiah:
alpha on the knowing how to make things.
Isaiah:
You have rapid growth of valuable intellectual property. It's really easy to
Isaiah:
capitalize. It's really easy to get started.
Isaiah:
And we're like, let's just export the annoying part, which is like the real
Isaiah:
making to other places. And that's highly flawed in the long term.
Isaiah:
It maybe is a good idea for about 10 or 15 years.
Isaiah:
In the long term, it turns out that your ability to know how to make things,
Isaiah:
has to be coupled with the making of them, right? Because what happens is you forget.
Isaiah:
You forget how to make things. And if you're not actively making things,
Isaiah:
you're not learning how to make them better.
Isaiah:
So the practical, you know, output of this is like, we forgot how to make cars,
Isaiah:
right? Like we started exporting car, you know, car production to other places.
Isaiah:
And Japan got really good at it. China got really good at it.
Isaiah:
And really only one company in the United States sort of like was like,
Isaiah:
huh, maybe we should remember how to make cars and make those again.
Isaiah:
And, you know, that'd be Tesla.
Isaiah:
And this happened across, you know, so many different industries,
Isaiah:
right? The reason that Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley is that we used
Isaiah:
to make silicon there. We used to make chips and then we exported them,
Isaiah:
you know, somewhere else for the actual production because we didn't want the
Isaiah:
effluent and the waste from that.
Isaiah:
And now guess what? We don't know how to make chips anymore,
Isaiah:
right? So this is very short term thinking. You actually have to be involved
Isaiah:
in the making in order to be educated on how to do the making.
David:
I'm reading a book about this same effect with Apple's iPhones,
David:
where they exported all the manufacturing to China.
David:
And that ended up actually just being an incubator for Chinese phone production.
David:
And so Huawei and all of these other Apple competitors all came out of China.
David:
And now actually only China knows how to make phones, including Apple iPhones.
David:
Correct. And so Apple is now realizing that they incubated the whole entire
David:
Chinese manufacturing thing, which is now the centerpiece of a lot of geopolitical debate right now.
Isaiah:
Exactly. Exactly. It's a short-term trade. It's something that finance people
Isaiah:
do, because they want to make, you know, a little bit of a better return in a 10 to 15 year period.
Isaiah:
And then after that, you realize that you exported the ability to actually know
Isaiah:
how to make things because the physical world is a real place, right?
Isaiah:
You can't actually model everything perfectly. You have to actually see how
Isaiah:
the steel behaves in practice. You have to see how the machine behaves in practice.
Isaiah:
And so, yeah, I think it's, it's, I actually don't even remember this question started.
Isaiah:
Now you've gotten me on a separate soapbox that I care a lot about,
Isaiah:
but, but you, you, you can't couple, do a couple of those things for too long.
Isaiah:
Oh, we were asking why fission now, right? This is one of those reasons, right?
Isaiah:
So we've had a, a return of rationality about making things in the physical
Isaiah:
world is one thing, right? So we suddenly realized like, it's actually probably
Isaiah:
important that we know how to make steel, right? It's actually important that
Isaiah:
we know how to manufacture things.
Isaiah:
And when you do that, you realize that energy price is really,
Isaiah:
really important, right?
Isaiah:
The reason that China dominates global aluminum is because they have three to
Isaiah:
four cents a kilowatt hour coal energy, right? They can make electricity at
Isaiah:
three to four cents a kilowatt hour and electrolyze bauxite.
Isaiah:
And that means they dominate aluminum. That also means they dominate gallium
Isaiah:
and germanium as well, which are really, really important to producing chips
Isaiah:
because that's downstream of bauxite electrolysis, right?
Isaiah:
And so this return to rationality drives us back to understanding that energy
Isaiah:
price in a society is really, really important. It's a strategic thing that a country has to have.
Isaiah:
The second thing that's happening is AI, right? So all the bits people suddenly woke up
Isaiah:
and realized like, okay, we actually need energy to even do our bits now,
Isaiah:
you know, because it used to be that a data center, the electricity price in
Isaiah:
the data center just didn't matter that much because you weren't using that
Isaiah:
much compute to send emails around.
Isaiah:
Now we're using an enormous amount of compute every day just to do our basic
Isaiah:
stuff because we want to use ChatGPT for everything.
Isaiah:
So that's the other thing. And so both of these things are just,
Isaiah:
you know, this return of rationality to the West to say...
Isaiah:
We need cheap energy. And you look around and you do the same logic that I did.
Isaiah:
And you realize nuclear is cheap energy. And by the way, you don't have to believe
Isaiah:
anything that I've said, you know, in theory about why nuclear will be cheap.
Isaiah:
You can actually just look at the past, right? So in the early 1970s,
Isaiah:
before Three Mile Island in the United States, nuclear fission,
Isaiah:
not only was the cheapest energy source, it remains the cheapest energy that
Isaiah:
humanity has ever experienced, right?
Isaiah:
So I'm going to say that again. In the early 1970s, the energy that we were
Isaiah:
getting out of nuclear reactors at that time remains the cheapest energy that
Isaiah:
humanity has ever experienced.
Isaiah:
And this is adjusting for inflation, right? I'm not talking about nominal 1970
Isaiah:
dollars. I'm talking about 2025 dollars.
Isaiah:
We were getting around three to three and a half cent per kilowatt hour energy
Isaiah:
out of nuclear reactors, right?
Isaiah:
Now, the cheapest energy you can get in the United States today is somewhere
Isaiah:
around five to six cents per kilowatt hour. It's a little bit difficult to calculate
Isaiah:
because of subsidies, but that's about as good as you can get.
Isaiah:
So we're about double, right, the energy that we were getting in the early 70s,
Isaiah:
even when, you know, adjusting for inflation.
David:
50 years ago.
Isaiah:
50 years ago. Yeah. And energy should always move the opposite direction,
Isaiah:
right? 50 years later, you should have 10 times cheaper energy than you did before.
Isaiah:
That was the trend up until the 1970s, and it was reversed. So I think there's
Isaiah:
this massive return to rationality on on energy price, which,
Isaiah:
you know, naturally leads you to the conclusion of fission.
Isaiah:
The other interesting thing is that, you know, I think that nuclear has had
Isaiah:
really bad marketing, right?
Isaiah:
It's it's had this, you know, intense scariness attached to it,
Isaiah:
which I think is very unjustified, because nuclear is the sort of the safest
Isaiah:
source of energy on earth.
Isaiah:
If you look at power generated versus human death toll, nuclear is the safest
Isaiah:
form of energy on Earth. It's even safer than solar, by the way,
Isaiah:
and we can talk about why that is in a second.
Isaiah:
One of the interesting things that happened was we had these nuclear incidents
Isaiah:
in the 70s and 80s. You had Fukushima. You had Chernobyl.
Isaiah:
And those were wildly misunderstood by the public.
Isaiah:
If you ask people on the street today, like, how many people died in Three Mile
Isaiah:
Island? People will say numbers in the hundreds. They'll say numbers in the
Isaiah:
thousands. Some people will say 10,000.
Isaiah:
Zero people is the answer, by the way. Zero people died in Three Mile Island. Nobody died.
David:
What about second-order consequences of polluted soil, polluted land,
David:
downstream effects? anything like that?
Isaiah:
13 independent studies after Three Mile Island that were largely funded by people
Isaiah:
who wanted to show that the nuclear industry was bad failed to find any environmental
Isaiah:
or health effects beyond the fence of the Three Mile Island facility.
Isaiah:
Not a single study, even funded by, you know, enemies of nuclear failed to find
Isaiah:
a single negative health effect or environmental effect beyond the fence of
Isaiah:
Three Mile Island, right?
Isaiah:
So now this didn't matter in the 70s and 80s. And the reason was because information
Isaiah:
flow was pretty centralized in the 70s and 80s, right?
Isaiah:
So if you had the media on board with the narrative, and you had Hollywood on
Isaiah:
board with the narrative, you
Isaiah:
generally, you know, had a good grip on what people thought about a thing.
Isaiah:
Now, we've had another nuclear incident since then, and that was Fukushima,
Isaiah:
right? And Fukushima, most people think was, you know, another death toll of nuclear.
Isaiah:
I actually take the opposite view. I think that Fukushima was,
Isaiah:
on net will prove to be a very positive thing.
Isaiah:
And the reason is, is because it was very similar to Three Mile Island,
Isaiah:
right? It was zero people died. There's maybe, maybe an argument that you can
Isaiah:
make that one person died, maybe.
Isaiah:
But it had a very similar impact, right, in terms of public sentiment.
Isaiah:
People immediately reacted the same way that they did for Through a Mile Island.
Isaiah:
There was this huge thing. They evacuated tens of thousands of people from the area.
Isaiah:
They shut down the nuclear industry in Japan for a couple of years.
Isaiah:
The reason this was different is that this is the information age,
Isaiah:
right? It happened in 2011. It happened in the age of the internet.
Isaiah:
And very quickly after this, people started to actually read the data.
Isaiah:
And they realized, wait a minute, nobody died.
Isaiah:
And, you know, the social impact of actually evacuating tens of thousands of
Isaiah:
people was orders of magnitude worse than the event itself.
Isaiah:
And the economic impact and even the death toll impact of shutting down all
Isaiah:
the nuclear reactors in Japan was, again, orders of magnitude more damaging
Isaiah:
to the Japanese than the actual event itself.
Isaiah:
And the fact that this happened in the Internet age began to wake people up.
Isaiah:
And you had a second backlash to that, where the Japanese went back and they
Isaiah:
said, we made a huge mistake, right? We made a really big mistake by evacuating
Isaiah:
tens of thousands of people and by shutting down our nuclear industry.
Isaiah:
And they're beginning to turn all those plants back on.
Isaiah:
And so I think that these are the two kind of factors that are bringing nuclear
Isaiah:
fission back today is that it's the information age, right?
Isaiah:
Anybody can go and read about Fukushima. Anyone can read about the Japanese
Isaiah:
decision to reverse the impacts of that and to turn plants back on.
Isaiah:
And then again, just a massive return of rationality to the importance of energy in the Western world.
Josh:
Yeah, 50 years is such a long time. And you mentioned the world of bits that we largely live in.
Josh:
And for the people that are not familiar, the world of bits is basically the
Josh:
computers, the ones and zeros that kind of run the world. But what we're talking
Josh:
about now is the acceleration of the world of atoms, which is the physical space,
Josh:
the meat space that we occupy right now.
Josh:
And there's definitely this trend that I'm starting to see, and you mentioned,
Josh:
in that people are starting to learn and get excited about this world of atoms.
Josh:
How do we create these physical objects that can break these barriers that have
Josh:
been left behind like energy 50 years ago?
Josh:
So I'm curious about your take on all of this. You co-founded a company called Valor. I'm curious...
Josh:
So how you think Valor can solve the nuclear energy problem? What are you building?
Josh:
For the people that are listening, you are sitting in front of what I believe
Josh:
is called Ward Zero. It's your first prototype reactor. So can you just explain
Josh:
to me kind of what you're, how you're tackling this problem in the world of
Josh:
atoms, giving us energy through Valor?
Isaiah:
Absolutely. So I'll tell you about what we built here and then what we're going
Isaiah:
to build in the future. So Ward Zero is the object standing behind me.
Isaiah:
This is what's called a non-nuclear prototype.
Isaiah:
So essentially what we did is we built a nuclear reactor, but we didn't put uranium in it.
Isaiah:
Right. So that's kind of how you can understand what's behind us.
Isaiah:
Built a full nuclear reactor. You could put uranium in this thing with a couple
Isaiah:
of minor modifications, and it would actually turn on and it would split atoms.
Isaiah:
Now, we don't do that because essentially the paperwork to actually do that
Isaiah:
in the United States would take four to five years, and we don't have four to
Isaiah:
five years. We have to do this immediately, right? So build the full reactor.
Isaiah:
And then what we put in it instead is a silicon carbide.
Isaiah:
Silicon carbide is a great material. It's an extremely high temperature ceramic.
Isaiah:
That's also a great electrical resistor. And so what that means is that we can
Isaiah:
basically dump about 12 city blocks of Los Angeles power into the core of this reactor.
Isaiah:
And we can simulate what a nuclear fission reaction would be doing inside that
Isaiah:
core, which is essentially generating a ton of heat, right? And then what we
Isaiah:
do is we process that heat in the same way that we would if this were uranium making the heat.
Isaiah:
So this gives us a very, very high fidelity, real world simulation of what a
Isaiah:
nuclear reactor would actually do.
Isaiah:
And the next step is to essentially go rebuild this reactor,
Isaiah:
one to one with a couple of lessons that we've learned on how to weld this thing,
Isaiah:
how to structure that thing, how to seal this thing, but actually put uranium
Isaiah:
in it and turn it on and split atoms for the first time.
Isaiah:
So that's the next step for the company. The vision of Valor is to...
Isaiah:
Rather than building these, you know, massive, massive nuclear plants that we
Isaiah:
did over the last 50 years, you had these like gigawatt scale reactors.
Isaiah:
We believe that small reactors are better in a bunch of ways,
Isaiah:
that this architecture is also better. This is a fundamentally safer nuclear
Isaiah:
reactor. It uses graphite instead of water as a moderator, and we can talk about why that's safer.
Isaiah:
But the plan is to, instead of building, you know, let's say a couple dozen
Isaiah:
very large reactors, we want to build thousands and thousands of these smaller reactors.
Isaiah:
Because again, one of the drivers to cost is, you know, there's two drivers
Isaiah:
of any physical good in terms of cost How big is it?
Isaiah:
How many you make, right? So we want to make small things that you make a ton
Isaiah:
of and that's going to make them really cheap.
David:
Is the idea here that i'll be able to go down to my local valor store and pick
David:
up a nuclear reactor and plug it into my home? Or how does that actually like
David:
plug into the grid and to start giving me energy?
Isaiah:
Yeah, so I would say probably not for a while,
Isaiah:
Nuclear reactors.
David:
I'm surprised that the answer is reasonably yes at all, to be honest.
Isaiah:
So I think over time, humanity continues to use nuclear fission more and more and more.
Isaiah:
It becomes the dominant source of energy in the world.
Isaiah:
But there's two questions at play. There's like, where does the energy come
Isaiah:
from? And then how does it get to you? Right. And those are two different things.
Isaiah:
One of the nice things about nuclear fission is that you make a ton of cheap energy in a location.
Isaiah:
And then you can sort of firewall the nuclear-ness of that from the end user,
Isaiah:
right? And the firewall there is that you transport the energy through a medium.
Isaiah:
And that medium is either electricity or it's also chemical energy,
Isaiah:
right? And the chemical energy part of that is really interesting.
Isaiah:
So our nuclear reactors, we'll make both. We'll make electricity.
Isaiah:
You can get our electricity from a grid and it should be much cheaper.
Isaiah:
We'll make electricity for AI data centers. And those data centers will be getting
Isaiah:
the best power rates in the world.
Isaiah:
But also we'll make chemical fuels, right? So we'll actually make hydrogen,
Isaiah:
we'll bond that hydrogen with CO2, and we can actually make a synthetic fuel,
Isaiah:
we can make diesel, gasoline, jet fuel.
Isaiah:
And you might get that in any of the places that you get those chemicals today,
Isaiah:
and those chemicals should be much cheaper.
Isaiah:
And so essentially, if you think about what we're doing there,
Isaiah:
we're sort of, we're arbing the physical infrastructure of hydrocarbons as a
Isaiah:
logistics platform, and we're plugging nuclear into it, right?
Isaiah:
And why would you do that, by the way. What's the point of that?
Isaiah:
Well, the point of that is that the hydrocarbon, think about hydrocarbons for a second as a grid.
Isaiah:
All right, so we're familiar with an electrical grid, right?
Isaiah:
You have a bunch of wires connected, and you push electrons through,
Isaiah:
and people get to consume that energy. Hydrocarbons are also a grid.
Isaiah:
They're a liquid grid, right? They're a network of pipelines and trucks and
Isaiah:
tanks that move them around.
Isaiah:
So let me ask you, which one is bigger, right? Which one's moving more energy,
Isaiah:
the electrical grid or the hydrocarbon grid?
David:
I would imagine the hydrocarbon grid because that's the whole combustion engine
David:
thing. Like how big is the combustion engine as a concept? I would imagine it's massive.
Isaiah:
Here's a crazy stat for you. On the ocean today, there's a bunch of ships,
Isaiah:
right? And those ships are burning hydrocarbons to propel themselves across the water.
Isaiah:
The energy being consumed by ships on the ocean today is greater than the entire
Isaiah:
electrical grid of the world.
Isaiah:
Just the ships. Correct. Just ships burning hydrocarbons are consuming more
Isaiah:
energy than the entire global electrical grid, right?
Josh:
That is a fun fact.
Isaiah:
That is unreal. Hydrocarbons are actually a much larger grid that's more distributed,
Isaiah:
that's more flexible than the electrical grid today.
Isaiah:
Right now, there are some downsides to hydrocarbons, right? One of the big downsides
Isaiah:
is that you're continuously adding CO2 to the atmosphere every year that you use them.
Isaiah:
Eventually, we want to stop doing that for a bunch of reasons.
Isaiah:
It's not just climate change. It's also the fact that, you know,
Isaiah:
eventually the CO2 level in the atmosphere becomes, you know,
Isaiah:
too high for, you know, after about 600 ppm, your brain function,
Isaiah:
you know, starts to go down those sorts of things.
Isaiah:
So there are lots of reasons why over time that's not sustainable.
Isaiah:
But if you just think about it as a grid, right, think about it as just moving energy around.
Isaiah:
The hydrocarbon grid, I would say, is far better, far better than the electrical
Isaiah:
grid. And it's far larger.
Isaiah:
And it has, you know, potential to move, you know, terawatt hours of energy around.
Isaiah:
Now, if you could fix the CO2 problem part of that and only get the logistics
Isaiah:
part, you know, you would have essentially given yourself the ability to distribute
Isaiah:
all of the world's energy from only a couple of points, which is great for verticalization.
Isaiah:
And it's actually quite solvable. The way that you do that is you take the CO2
Isaiah:
out of the atmosphere and you build it into a hydrocarbon, allow people to burn
Isaiah:
it, which puts it back into the atmosphere.
Isaiah:
And you take it back out, send it out, allow people to burn it, puts it back in.
Isaiah:
You take it back out, and you've created a closed loop of CO2,
Isaiah:
right? So you're not adding net new CO2 to the atmosphere every year,
Isaiah:
you have a fixed rate of people, you know, CO2 PPM.
Isaiah:
And you're essentially just using the atmosphere as a transport mechanism to
Isaiah:
get your ingredients back to you again.
Isaiah:
Because remember, CO2, you know, these, it's not carbon, that's energetic,
Isaiah:
it's the structure of the molecule that's, you know, that's energetic.
Isaiah:
And the nuclear fission is essentially infusing CO2 and water into an energetic
Isaiah:
form, which is a hydrocarbon, right? You're ejecting the oxygen out of that.
Isaiah:
Now you have an unoxidized chemical.
Isaiah:
And I'm sorry, I know I'm getting a little bit chemistry, you know,
Isaiah:
bored here, but that is essentially what we're planning to do.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm going to try to ask you this question in a way that you can explain
Josh:
it to normal people where we don't go too deep in chemistry,
Josh:
but I'm curious about what makes these reactors different than...
Josh:
I know people, the pebble bed reactors are very popular, the Gen 4 reactors
Josh:
that are coming, they're much larger.
Josh:
You mentioned modularity is one part of it, but what are the benefits aside
Josh:
from the small size, aside from the
Josh:
modularity that you are kind of taking advantage of relative to the size?
Josh:
Is it just size or is there something else that's also going on behind the seeds
Josh:
or within the reactor that makes it more, I guess, more powerful and more efficient?
Isaiah:
So I would actually say that these reactors will be less powerful per size than
Isaiah:
some of the reactors that have been built before.
Isaiah:
The reason that we do that is that it makes it safer, right?
Isaiah:
So one of our beliefs here is like safety is probably the most important driver of cost in nuclear.
Isaiah:
If you can make a reactor that's 10 times safer, you can actually make it 10
Isaiah:
times cheaper because it allows you to do it more often, more quickly deployed at scale.
Isaiah:
So these will actually be a little bit less power dense than traditional light
Isaiah:
water reactors. reactors, but we actually get to manufacture them,
Isaiah:
we get to make a ton of them and that makes them cheaper.
Isaiah:
The really unique thing here is that these reactors are just a lot hotter,
Isaiah:
right? So the outlet temperature on these reactors will be around 800, 850 degrees Celsius.
Isaiah:
That's compared to 300, sometimes 350 degrees Celsius in a light water reactor.
Isaiah:
That unlocks two really important things. So the way that you make energy in
Isaiah:
a nuclear reactor traditionally is that you have a very hot outlet temperature.
Isaiah:
And then you have ambient air at a certain temperature as well.
Isaiah:
And you can extract energy from the difference between those two temperatures,
Isaiah:
right? And this is called Carnot efficiency, right? So you have a hot, a tea hot and a tea cold.
Isaiah:
And the difference between those temperatures governs the maximum amount of
Isaiah:
energy they can get out of that.
Isaiah:
For most plants around the world, this is 20 to 30%, right, of the total energy
Isaiah:
that you can get out of that.
Isaiah:
In a hydrocarbon engine, which works a similar way, you can push,
Isaiah:
you know, into the mid 30s in, you know, very efficient nat gas combined cycle
Isaiah:
generators, you can push 50, you know, 50% total efficiency.
Isaiah:
But this is all limited by the basic physics of the difference between your
Isaiah:
hot side and your cold side.
Isaiah:
The way to increase that diff and the way to increase the efficiency is essentially
Isaiah:
just to make the difference larger, right? The larger the difference between
Isaiah:
the cold side and the hot side, the greater efficiency you can get out of that.
Isaiah:
And it turns out that at 850C, you can actually get really efficient at producing
Isaiah:
electricity, right? So we'll be significantly more efficient at producing electricity
Isaiah:
than a traditional nuclear reactor.
Isaiah:
Now, the other really interesting thing that gets unlocked here by doing high
Isaiah:
temperatures is actually direct production of hydrogen, right?
Isaiah:
So ideally, right, hydrogen is a chemical energy, right? Pure hydrogen,
Isaiah:
because it's deoxidized, and the fact that we have oxygen in the atmosphere
Isaiah:
means that it's chemical potential energy.
Isaiah:
If you take that hydrogen and you combine it with the atmosphere,
Isaiah:
you get water and you get a ton of energy, right?
Isaiah:
So in theory, a really good thing to do with a nuclear reactor is to seed that
Isaiah:
process, right? You get some water, you combine it with reactor energy,
Isaiah:
and you get free hydrogen. And now that's a very valuable thing that you can go and sell.
Isaiah:
You can combine it with CO2 to make a hydrocarbon. You can do a bunch of things with it.
Isaiah:
Now, the way in the past that people have thought about nuclear to hydrocarbon,
Isaiah:
sorry, nuclear to hydrogen.
Isaiah:
Is to start with electricity, right? So have a nuclear reactor that spins a
Isaiah:
turbine, makes electricity, run the electricity through an electrolyzer,
Isaiah:
right? That electrolyzes water, and then you get hydrogen out of it.
Isaiah:
The problem with this is that you get two efficiency hits, right?
Isaiah:
So you get the efficiency hit of making electricity, right?
Isaiah:
Which as we know, could be a, you know, a 60%, 70% hit to your efficiency,
Isaiah:
you lose a ton of that energy, just making the electricity,
Isaiah:
then you have the efficiency hit of running it through an electrolyzer,
Isaiah:
right and that electrolyzer also has an efficiency
Isaiah:
you know related to it as well and you're losing a lot of that energy so by
Isaiah:
the time you've gone from uranium fission in a core to chemical potential hydrogen
Isaiah:
you've lost a ton of energy in that process
Isaiah:
the other thing is you've added a lot of physical machinery right so you've
Isaiah:
added a turbine and a generator and an electrolyzer and again you want to make
Isaiah:
machines as small as possible and as simple as possible,
Isaiah:
an interesting alternate to this is that you just use heat to split water, right?
Isaiah:
So any chemical will actually decompose, it'll break down at a certain temperature,
Isaiah:
right? So at a certain temperature, every chemical compound will decompose.
Isaiah:
And so in theory, you can essentially just get water hot enough from a nuclear
Isaiah:
reactor to get free hydrogen out of it.
Isaiah:
Now, in practicality, if you catalyze it properly, that temperature somewhere
Isaiah:
around 1600 to 1800 degrees Celsius, that's too hot for us today.
Isaiah:
Someday we'll have reactors that run that hot, too hot for us today.
Isaiah:
But what you can do is you can run that water through a couple of chemical cycles,
Isaiah:
and transform them into another chemical that has a much lower decomposition temperature.
Isaiah:
So what I'm talking about here is something called the sulfur iodine cycle.
Isaiah:
The sulfur iodine cycle is a chemical cycle that takes water,
Isaiah:
makes two other acids out of that water, and then you use heat to decompose
Isaiah:
those acids, and you get hydrogen out of that and then you recycle the ingredients.
Isaiah:
So sulfur and iodine, if you combine water.
Isaiah:
With sulfur dioxide and iodine, you get two acids out of that.
Isaiah:
You get a hydriotic acid and sulfuric acid, and you can actually decompose those
Isaiah:
two acids just below the output temperature of this reactor, right?
Isaiah:
So you can do it around 750 to 800 degrees Celsius, and they will just thermally
Isaiah:
break down and you get the free hydrogen out of that.
Isaiah:
So what are we left with? Well, you don't need a turbine, right?
Isaiah:
Because we're not making electricity.
Isaiah:
You don't need a generator and you don't need an electrolyzer.
Isaiah:
Instead, you just need a couple of tanks of chemicals, right?
Isaiah:
You need a good heat exchanger to do that thermal decomposition.
Isaiah:
So we see this as an incredible way to add a much higher efficiency where you're
Isaiah:
not limited by the Carnot cycle, and you're not limited by the efficiency of
Isaiah:
an electrolyzer to essentially just take reactor heat with very minimal moving
Isaiah:
parts and just a couple of tanks of chemicals and make hydrogen.
Isaiah:
And we think it'll be the cheapest hydrogen in the world. Sorry,
Isaiah:
you told me to say that without chemistry, and then there's.
David:
A like there was a lot of yeah chemistry and like matter that was a in the contrast
David:
of bits versus atoms that was heavy on the atoms side of things yep and maybe
David:
you could just like extrapolate like
David:
when we're talking about atoms and moving atoms and manipulating atoms to produce
David:
the things that we want the conversation starts with a lot of the stuff that
David:
you just said first it starts with
David:
getting the energy producing the energy in order to manipulate atoms josh brought
David:
up this contrast of like for the last, you know, 30 years since the rise of
David:
the internet, the rise of Silicon Valley, the world, humanity has really been
David:
heavily invested into bits.
David:
Like how do we make the bits in
David:
the right order, the ones and zeros in the right order to produce value?
David:
And like atoms has lagged in contrast to bits over the rise of the internet.
David:
But you are getting really excited about atoms. Maybe you can,
David:
can you give, get me and Josh and also our listeners, get them excited about atoms.
David:
Like once we unlock having the right atoms in the right order to unlock energy,
David:
how does the world of atoms get easier to change, easier to flip, flip a bit?
David:
Like how do we get flipping atoms easy as flipping bits downstream of all of
David:
this? Just get us excited about Matt Adams.
Isaiah:
So I'm actually going to flip it around for you a little bit and say,
Isaiah:
everyone has always been excited about atoms.
Isaiah:
Like atoms is actually what we we have all cared about for the last 50 years,
Isaiah:
but we also care about money right and it what's been true over the last like
Isaiah:
30 to 40 years is like well first of all,
Isaiah:
the reason we care about money is generally because of atoms like what do people
Isaiah:
do once they get money from let's say starting a sass company and becoming a billionaire
Isaiah:
well they spend that money on atoms right they they start to have a private
Isaiah:
chef which makes them delicious food they get a private jet which like flies
Isaiah:
them around wherever they want to go they get a beautiful house, they get a boat, right?
Isaiah:
So I would actually argue like the world of atoms has always been the thing
Isaiah:
that is very interesting to people.
Isaiah:
Now the second thing is that there's this intellectual side that's also very
Isaiah:
interesting to people, which is like the right way to order bits, right?
Isaiah:
And that is like a captivating question in the mind that has,
Isaiah:
you know, driven a generation of entrepreneurs and a generation of innovators and engineers.
Isaiah:
But I think that's mostly just been driven by the fact that the world of bits
Isaiah:
was really the only place you could be intellectually curious, right?
Isaiah:
If you're a intellectually curious person, and you're an engineer,
Isaiah:
and you have the option before you as look, life starts when you're in high school, right?
Isaiah:
So like, when you're in high school, and the options in front of you are opening
Isaiah:
a laptop, and creating something, right, by the end of the day,
Isaiah:
right, by the end of the day, as a 17 year old with a laptop,
Isaiah:
you can have created something that's functional, and maybe even makes you some money.
Isaiah:
And a couple years later, you could be making a lot of money.
Isaiah:
And in five years, you could be a millionaire, right? Like, the world of bits
Isaiah:
was the place that that happened.
Isaiah:
So I think that our obsession with bits is actually more an obsession with innovation.
Isaiah:
It's an obsession with discovery and with engineering. And the world of bits
Isaiah:
was the only place you could really do that.
Isaiah:
So then we have to back up and say, like, why was bits the only place you could do that?
Isaiah:
Well, there's two reasons. Like, one is the simple, like, political answer,
Isaiah:
right? Which is like, it became very hard to do things in the world of atoms
Isaiah:
in the West, we added an enormous amount of federal regulation over everything that moves.
Isaiah:
And we didn't do that in bits, right? And so a 17 year old could open a laptop
Isaiah:
and create something with almost no interaction with regulation.
Isaiah:
Whereas, you know, just trying to, you know, make a sample rocket,
Isaiah:
you're wondering, like, oh, am I, you know, south of some sort of like regulation
Isaiah:
here that says that I can't have, you know, this chemical in this room and that sort of thing.
Isaiah:
And so there was just a very quick, easy path to being an engineer,
Isaiah:
to being an innovator, to being somebody who's intellectually curious with bits.
Isaiah:
The other thing, though, is that it's the second thing we talked about where,
Isaiah:
there is a fundamental limitation in the world of atoms that hasn't existed
Isaiah:
in bits in terms of like cycle time, right?
Isaiah:
Like, so the fact that if you're sitting in front of a laptop,
Isaiah:
you can have a piece of software at the end of the day that's doing something cool.
Isaiah:
Whereas, you know, if you have a physical thing in your mind,
Isaiah:
it maybe takes a couple of weeks.
Isaiah:
I think that's also changing. And that's what I'm really, really excited about, right?
Isaiah:
The things that we talked about before, you have energy, intelligence, and dexterity.
Isaiah:
As intelligence and dexterity get cheaper, and energy gets cheaper,
Isaiah:
I believe that we will start to play with matter in the same way that we play
Isaiah:
with bits, right? Life starts in high school, okay? It starts where you play.
Isaiah:
The reason that we have so many incredible software engineers and so much software
Isaiah:
is that people play with computers when they are in high school, right?
Isaiah:
And literally play, Right. We're playing video games. A lot of software engineers
Isaiah:
that I know got into software because they were playing video games and it gave
Isaiah:
them this like love of computers.
Isaiah:
And then they started modding the software and they wanted it to do cooler things.
Isaiah:
And that taught them software engineering because they want to make an extension
Isaiah:
to Minecraft, something like that.
Isaiah:
And I think that we're going to start playing with atoms. What would playing
Isaiah:
with atoms look like? Well, it would look like talking to an AI that runs a
Isaiah:
CNC machine or runs a 3D printer.
Isaiah:
And you actually can start to get these cycle times again. You can maybe by
Isaiah:
the end of the day be holding the thing that you thought about.
Isaiah:
And then the next day you tweak it, you make it better. You could be holding
Isaiah:
the physical object that you were thinking about.
Isaiah:
I don't think I need to convince people that that's more exciting than software, right?
Isaiah:
Like you imagine, you know, a drone that can fly you around, right?
Isaiah:
And within a couple of days, you're sitting on it and it's in the air,
Isaiah:
right? Like that's the future that I would like to see and that I think happens
Isaiah:
in the next 10 to 20 years as dexterity gets cheaper, as intelligence gets cheaper.
Isaiah:
I don't think I will have to convince many people to be tinkering with the real
Isaiah:
world once it becomes possible to do that again.
Josh:
Yeah, that sounds right. And it feels like the world of atoms as that accelerates
Josh:
will be even more accessible and more, I guess, quality of life improving for
Josh:
the average person than the world of bits.
Josh:
I feel like with the world of bits, and correct me where I'm wrong,
Josh:
but a lot of times you are extracting value from software, or maybe you're injecting
Josh:
yourself into social media.
Josh:
You're just kind of reading and writing with this thing, but it doesn't extrapolate
Josh:
out too much into the real world.
Josh:
So when we do have this accessibility, I think about myself and where I could
Josh:
use an abundance of energy.
Josh:
My car, for example, it costs 20 something cents per kilowatt.
Josh:
If we get that down to free, it becomes much easier to get around.
Josh:
But even things where we're building humanoid robots and and these things can
Josh:
probably be more cost effective.
Josh:
I'm curious kind of if you can if you have any fun or interesting examples to
Josh:
get people excited about what what it actually looks like for the average person.
Josh:
Like how is how's my day actually improved as we get this abundance of energy that's much cheaper?
Isaiah:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's just a really like everyday person example.
Isaiah:
The reason that your dishwasher sucks is because of energy regulation.
Isaiah:
Right the reason that you can't just like throw an entire plate of food into
Isaiah:
the dishwasher without having to do any wiping,
Isaiah:
all right, when you're done eating food, you should basically just pick up the
Isaiah:
plate in front of you and like throw it to a machine.
Isaiah:
And the machine does the rest, right? And like the next time you're ready to
Isaiah:
eat food, you like pick up a plate, you put food on it, and then you like throw
Isaiah:
it back to the machine. That's how this should work.
Isaiah:
And the only reason that it doesn't work that way is actually energy regulation.
Isaiah:
It's called Energy Star.
Isaiah:
There's a fleet of regulations that we've put around how our appliances use
Isaiah:
energy that has essentially forced the industry to create these machines around
Isaiah:
a function of regulation.
Isaiah:
Why do like dishwashers and washing machines like seem like they don't really
Isaiah:
get that much better and the user interface doesn't change that much?
Isaiah:
It's essentially because we're solving for energy regulations,
Isaiah:
right? So in an energy abundant future, like the machines should just do the annoying stuff for you.
Isaiah:
You know, we're 50 years from the invention of, I mean, probably more than that
Isaiah:
of the dishwasher and it's like not that different of an experience
Isaiah:
so i i would i would say like let's get way more creative like what is what
Isaiah:
is living in a house look like well it looks like just doing what you enjoy
Isaiah:
and you know when you're like literally throw it i think that'd be pretty sick
Isaiah:
like i want i want to see i want to come up with like a dishwasher of the future
Isaiah:
where you literally throw it that would be sick.
Josh:
Oh that makes me really
Isaiah:
Happy and like all of your clothes like your dishwasher your washing machine
Isaiah:
should not just first of all you shouldn't load it. Like what is loading it?
Isaiah:
That's nonsense. Like I want to throw my clothes at the basket and it just comes back folded, right?
Isaiah:
My washing machine should fold my clothes too and should put them back in the drawer.
Isaiah:
And, you know, like that sort of thing is like very, very obvious to me.
Isaiah:
Maybe that's through humanoids.
Isaiah:
Maybe that's through, you know, just better dishwashers and the concept of a
Isaiah:
dishwasher becomes very different. But all of these things are unlocked by energy.
Isaiah:
Now, something that's very motivating to me, I talked about the dishwashers
Isaiah:
and the washing machines because that's like an everyman thing but like i'm
Isaiah:
also extremely motivated by by outer space
Isaiah:
Right. And there's no formulation where we are man among the stars,
Isaiah:
man on the moon, man in Mars without abundant energy. And that's what's really, really exciting to me.
Isaiah:
Energy is essentially the biggest tool that you need to go and make the solar
Isaiah:
system a fun place to be for humans.
Isaiah:
You know, it's how you can terraform a planet. It's how you can create habitations.
Isaiah:
You know, it's how you can create, you know, big floating cities above Venus.
Isaiah:
And it's that's you know there's lots of mechanical problems to solve in there
Isaiah:
but again there's an extent to which mechanical problems will be solved by intelligence
Isaiah:
right intelligence and dexterity and essentially you just need a lot of energy
Isaiah:
to do it that's what i'm really excited about.
Josh:
So i feel like there's probably these these two core pillars that people can
Josh:
get really excited it's about how this energy affects their everyday life and
Josh:
we could probably have a full podcast conversation about the interesting new
Josh:
ways that you could design things that we use every day to be improved
Josh:
but it's also the the dreamer vision where now because we have this new abundant energy unlocked.
Josh:
We can dream about going to the stars and the downstream effects of that.
Josh:
We had Sean McGuire on the show fairly recently, and he was talking about how
Josh:
focusing on something like Mars has downstream effects for people back at home,
Josh:
where in order to get to Mars, we need that nuclear reactor that fits in a suitcase,
Josh:
and we need all these new technologies.
Josh:
So I think, and I'm hopeful based on what you're saying, is that we will get
Josh:
this, all these downstream effects, hopefully fairly soon, or at least directionally
Josh:
we're headed towards that now in the way that we weren't in the past.
Josh:
I'm curious what you think about timelines. When when will people start to notice
Josh:
the effects of this cheaper energy when when will we start to have dishwashers
Josh:
that can catch the dishes or or robots that can fold our clothes and in a way
Josh:
that's kind of accessible for the average person to use
Isaiah:
I think that is entirely limited by entrepreneurs, right?
Isaiah:
So when we think of like tech today and we think of like startups today.
Isaiah:
All we're really talking about is like young, crazy people who have some like
Isaiah:
wild vision of how a dishwasher should actually catch your plate and then decide
Isaiah:
to go make that thing a reality.
Isaiah:
And the fundamental motivation for that is twofold. Like one,
Isaiah:
they want to imprint their will on the universe and they want,
Isaiah:
you know, every single home to have a dishwasher that catches your dishes.
Isaiah:
Two they want to become a billionaire or a centimillionaire or whatever.
Isaiah:
The becoming a centimillionaire and the possibility of imprinting your your
Isaiah:
will on reality has been mostly
Isaiah:
impossible and in the physical world in the west right different in in you know
Isaiah:
other countries in the world specifically china but in the west this has not been a path because of
Isaiah:
not enough energy and also because of very stringent regulation that makes it
Isaiah:
just difficult for innovation to happen and difficult for companies to scale.
Isaiah:
I think both of those things are heading in the right direction right now,
Isaiah:
which is that you see tons of entrepreneurs suddenly realizing that you can
Isaiah:
become a billionaire by making something cool.
Isaiah:
Impulse Labs is a great example of this, right? Sam is a buddy.
Isaiah:
You know, he was like, Stowe's should be 100 times better than they are right
Isaiah:
now, right? And that's what he's doing.
Isaiah:
So I think there'll be a ton more people who go out and do things like that.
Isaiah:
The second side is the regulation side. I think we're seeing a lot of fundamental
Isaiah:
change in how we think about regulation especially at the federal level that
Isaiah:
will affect that significantly.
Isaiah:
But it's it's gated on people listening to this podcast like it's gated to to
Isaiah:
young people in high school who are like I have a different vision for what your couch should be.
Isaiah:
I think the couch should be way sicker than it is right now.
Isaiah:
And I'm going to become a billionaire doing that.
Josh:
That's a future that seems really excited that I can get very pumped about.
Josh:
It feels like the future ahead is actually going to look like the future.
Josh:
When I look out over New York City, it will probably look materially different
Josh:
than over the next decade than it did in the past decade. So that's a future
Josh:
I think a lot of people can get super excited about.
Isaiah:
This is a great point, by the way. And in the future, looking like the future
Isaiah:
is like also why we did this. You know, we have a bunch of people on Twitter.
Isaiah:
I collect Twitter haters. It's very fun. And we're like, why does your nuclear
Isaiah:
reactor look like a video game? Or like, you know, what's going on here?
Isaiah:
And like the answer is...
Josh:
It reminded me almost like an NVIDIA GPU type thing. It looks very cool.
Isaiah:
You know, I tried to make it not look like a GPU. It's very,
Isaiah:
very hard to make a vertical box not look like a GPU.
Isaiah:
It's just kind of what they look like. But, you know, it is very futuristic.
Isaiah:
It's Tron. It's Star Trek. And yeah, the reason is absolutely the future should look like the future.
Isaiah:
And, you know, when you're walking into a nuclear reactor that was built in
Isaiah:
the year 2025, it should not feel like you're at like a hospital switchboard
Isaiah:
in the 1970s. And that's definitely what we're going for here.
David:
For the podcast listeners that are not watching the video, Isaiah's background
David:
is the most sci-fi, industrial-looking thing. It looks like you just opened
David:
the first level on Doom and you're on Mars.
David:
While he was talking, a man in a Segway just zipped on by, going like 20 miles
David:
an hour. And it was extremely distracting because it was a little bit surreal
David:
just watching this man zipping around this factory floor
Isaiah:
With a nuclear power reactor. I didn't realize that. That's great.
Isaiah:
Sometimes when I'm on calls, people think that this is a fake background until
Isaiah:
I see a forklift go by. you know, carrying a pallet. And they're like,
Isaiah:
oh, that's real. That's happening.
Josh:
It's very real. Well, there's one more topic that I want to touch on that's
Josh:
very front of mind for us particularly here.
Josh:
Limitless is how we're powering kind of this AI and the intelligence revolution
Josh:
and how we're doing these data centers and kind of how we power the rest of
Josh:
everything. So these are modular reactors. I understand that you can use them
Josh:
in clusters. You could kind of stack them on top of each other to create data.
Josh:
What I understand also is companies
Josh:
like XAI and companies like OpenAI are kind of energy constrained.
Josh:
And what I'm curious to ask you about is, will this technology be capable of
Josh:
powering these data centers, one?
Josh:
And then is it actually powerful enough or is it modular enough that we could
Josh:
scale that across the country to the average person? So, like,
Josh:
will we be able to power data centers? Will we be able to power my neighborhood?
Josh:
How does that kind of distribution of these reactors work as you start to roll them out?
Isaiah:
Yeah. So this is, you know, just good business sense at this point.
Isaiah:
You know, what, how do you actually go and scale a business?
Isaiah:
I would love if our reactors in the next five years could power every American home.
Isaiah:
There are business constraints to that, regulatory constraints to that.
Isaiah:
I think the easiest thing for Valor Atomics to do today is to go help AI achieve
Isaiah:
all of its goals, right? Help all of the hyperscalers get all the power that
Isaiah:
they need to win the AI race to make sure that the United States of America
Isaiah:
is the most dominant AI country in the world.
Isaiah:
That's a massive, massive problem that we're going to solve in the next five years.
Isaiah:
Now, beyond that, yes, I'm very excited about that energy getting into your
Isaiah:
hands. And I think there are two ways that that can happen.
Isaiah:
The one way is, you know, we go and build, you know, small reactors around the
Isaiah:
country, right? So we have four of these units next to your neighborhood, that sort of thing.
Isaiah:
Another really interesting way, though, is that we just make the hydrocarbons
Isaiah:
that the world consumes, right? So if you're going to get on a jet aircraft
Isaiah:
in about five years, I hope that that fuel is made by Valor Atomics Reactors.
Isaiah:
And I hope that that fuel is about a third the cost that it is today.
Isaiah:
And because fuel is the largest operating cost of an airline,
Isaiah:
I hope that your plane ticket is much cheaper.
Isaiah:
And if you're going to be driving on a bus or you're going to be driving on
Isaiah:
a truck or you're getting goods delivered to your house from a semi truck,
Isaiah:
I hope that all of those things are much, much cheaper because they're buying
Isaiah:
Valor Atomics fuel, which is a whole lot cheaper than refining oil.
Isaiah:
And then in the long term, I think absolutely, our reactors are powering the
Isaiah:
grid all around the world.
Josh:
I'm curious about the global energy mix, kind of how nuclear,
Josh:
how prescient nuclear is relative to others. So we're burning lots of fossil
Josh:
fuels. We have a lot of solar energy.
Josh:
Does the equilibrium eventually balance out to a mix of those three?
Josh:
Or do you see a future in which it's actually all just nuclear?
Isaiah:
I believe that,
Isaiah:
the power mix in the next, let's say, 50 years is going to become 99.1,
Isaiah:
99 nuclear fission, 1%, you know, other things.
Isaiah:
I think that solar will always have some applicability in remote places,
Isaiah:
right? There's always going to be that one place that you want to be where there's
Isaiah:
no infrastructure, and you just need a bit of power to run some compute,
Isaiah:
you know, to keep yourself warm. And it's hard to beat a solar panel for that.
Isaiah:
But in terms of the massive, massive volumes that humanity needs going forward
Isaiah:
to power AI, to power robotics, it's going to be nuclear. And even hydrocarbons, right?
Isaiah:
Most of the world's energy today is hydrocarbons.
Isaiah:
And if those hydrocarbons become just a transport mechanism for nuclear power,
Isaiah:
I think you're going to see a world of 99.1. And I think that's going to be
Isaiah:
a much cheaper way. And it's going to be much more abundant.
David:
Isaiah, as we wrap up this podcast and you get back to work,
David:
working on a literal nuclear reactor that's in your background,
David:
what are you going to do first?
David:
Seriously, what's next for you? What are your priorities for this week,
David:
for this month? Where are you in the arc of what you're trying to build?
Isaiah:
Absolutely. The next goal for Valor Atomics is essentially to go rebuild this
Isaiah:
thing one-to-one, put uranium in it, and split atoms for the first time.
Isaiah:
That's all we think about every day.
Isaiah:
You know, nothing gets built in the world without it actually getting built,
Isaiah:
right? One of our big convictions at Valor is that you can only design so much on paper, right?
Isaiah:
Designing something for five years on a piece of paper is going to teach you
Isaiah:
less than building it in the first year, testing it, building another one,
Isaiah:
testing it, building another one, testing it.
Isaiah:
That's what we're doing for the next few years. We're building reactors.
Isaiah:
We're making them bigger, more powerful, more sophisticated.
Isaiah:
And we're getting into the practice of building reactors and splitting atoms.
Isaiah:
That's our entire focus right now.
Isaiah:
So look out for Ward 1, which will be our first critical nuclear reactor.
David:
And if you had a message for our listeners, our listeners are pretty intellectually
David:
curious, high-agency people who just always like getting their fingers in the dirt.
David:
Any advice for them? How can they support you if they are just peaked and pilled by your mission?
David:
Or just any general advice for what they should do if they are just interested in learning more.
Isaiah:
Yeah, absolutely. You can follow me on Twitter, Isaiah underscore P underscore
Isaiah:
Taylor. Post some awesome stuff in there all the time.
Isaiah:
We keep it spicy. You can find Valor Atomics, valoratomics.com.
Isaiah:
That's V-A-L-A-R, atomics.com.
Isaiah:
And come visit us. Come check out the reactor.
David:
Where is it? Where is the actual reactor? Where is the facility?
Isaiah:
We're here in Los Angeles. We're in Hawthorne, about a mile from SpaceX.
Isaiah:
We've got great beaches, great surfing, in some of the best engineers in the
Isaiah:
world creating the future.
Josh:
I just wanted to let people know to absolutely follow you guys,
Josh:
because that's actually how I found you. I love the theatrics you do around
Josh:
the company, where you guys had this big unveiling event. And I was like,
Josh:
who are these people that are turning a nuclear reactor event into this big thing?
Josh:
And it was you. And it makes the future more exciting. Just wanted to thank
Josh:
you, because we need more founders like you trying these hard things,
Josh:
improving our world in this life of atoms so that the everyday life becomes a lot more exciting.
Josh:
So we're just super, super grateful, really glad that you joined us today and
Josh:
excited for other people to hear your mission.
Isaiah:
Well, thank you. And I'm glad that you fell for my psyop of the party,
Isaiah:
which was essentially an exercise to see how many tech bros we could get to
Isaiah:
show up into a building wearing a suit and tie.
Isaiah:
And I think that we did quite well. We saw a lot of suits and ties that night
Isaiah:
on Tech Bro. So it was very successful.
Josh:
Certainly nerd sniped me.
David:
Isaiah, thanks for joining us on the list.
Isaiah:
Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.
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