Nuclear Race to Power Superintelligence

I believe we must.

Isaiah Taylor, welcome to Sorcery.

Good to see you, Molly. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for coming. I know you're like one of the first people of the day. So, what's it like downstairs at Reindustrialize?

It's entertaining down there. There's a lot of people in the building. We got some protesters outside just to make sure that... Yeah, we have some fun protesters outside the building, but you know, it just gives you some auras you're walking up. It makes you notorious. I'm like, man, I'm like Tony Stark walking up here. So, yeah, it's fun.

What are they protesting?

I couldn't really tell, honestly. I think probably the fact that a lot of the people here are making defense tech. So, yeah, it's a fun way to walk up in the morning.

Great. Well, all right. We'll see about that. Let's talk about you and let's talk about Valor. So, for people who don't know what Valor is and your background, could you share more on that?

Yeah, so I'm the CEO and founder of Valor Atomic. We are making nuclear reactors built for planetary scale. So, nuclear in the last 40 to 50 years has been sort of a one-off industry. You have a plant built here, a plant built there. There were a couple of models and units of reactors built in duplicates around the world, but nobody has really been able to manufacture lots of reactors and plug them in in series. And that's what we're working on. So, we have our first what's called a non-nuclear reactor prototype in LA. We're doing temperature testing on it, pressure testing on it. And we're looking at criticality next year. So, we're getting really excited.

What's the current state of nuclear in the US? It seems to be laggard, but it seems like there's a lot of energy, no pun intended, around it.

Yeah, you know, nuclear in the United States has been paused for about 46 years. It's been paused essentially since Three Mile Island. And there's some good reasons for that, some bad reasons for that. The industry sort of took a pause when Three Mile Island happened to re-evaluate and make sure everything was safe. And unfortunately, when you pause an industry, it's kind of hard to restart it again. The tools atrophy, the labor is not really there anymore, the regulator is not in practice. And so, we're really trying to reboot this and start over. But when you reboot an industry, you have to make sure that you are designing the reactors in a way that makes sense for the new methods of building things, right? We build things differently in the United States than we used to 50 or 60 years ago. We don't do as well at like very large scale manufacturing or very large scale construction. We're much better at modular manufacturing. So, that's really what we focus on is building a modular reactor that can be manufactured here and that we build thousands of throughout the United States.

So, what role exactly does Valor have in America's reindustrialization?

I mean, I think energy is one of the most important inputs that you could possibly give the reindustrialization movement. Cheap energy is how we make metals, right? It's how we would make aluminum and steel and all of the base metals that we use to make parts. If you think about what's happening over the next 100 years in manufacturing and reindustrialization, we're essentially taking what was an extremely labor-heavy industry into being an energy-heavy industry. Right? So, instead of, you know, the manipulation of machines with, you know, hand lathes and these sorts of things, you have automatic lathes and automatic CNC, you have robots moving parts around. So, we're really just starting to consume energy to create physical goods. And that's also true at the materials layer as well, right? So, at the layer of making the steel, making the aluminum, you're essentially just consuming energy. So, if we have cheap energy, we have a real shot at making, you know, all the stuff that we need to make for our nation and for other nations around the world. So, it's very exciting.

There's plenty of bottlenecks around this. You mentioned almost 50 years of stagnation. What exactly are the regulatory hurdles that are impeding on any progress?

Yeah, you know, I think people miss the function of regulators. Regulators are really supposed to take technology that exists and add guardrails around them, right? So, once a new technology is created, it's invented, it's tested out, now you want to do many of these, you know, piece of technology around the world. This is a really general statement, right? It could be reactors, it could be cars, airplanes. And you add guardrails around that. The thing that you have to be careful about with regulation is that you need to still allow innovation to happen. Right? So, regulators and innovation don't play super well together. You really want a space of freedom to explore and to test things out. And that's what we've been able to do really well in things like cars and airplanes. We haven't done it so well in nuclear. Right? If you want to go and turn on a test reactor and see how your technology works and, you know, get good at constructing reactors before you do big ones, historically in the United States, it's taken 5 to 6 years. Right? And 5 to 6 years is too long of an R&D cycle, right? You really want R&D cycles to be 12 to 18 months at most. So, that's really what's been missing. I'm really excited today though. There's a massive opportunity to do this in the United States now. President Trump signed some executive orders about a month and a half ago, which really open up the opportunity for nuclear companies to turn on test reactors here. So, we're working on that and we're really excited to do that for the first time next year.

That's great. What exactly are the executive orders that he signed?

So, he signed four of them. The one that's most relevant here is revitalizing nuclear testing at the Department of Energy. So, the Department of Energy is a test authority in the United States. It has the authority to basically take a prime contractor and allow them to split an atom out in, you know, the middle of nowhere, somewhere it's very safe to do that. And that allows us to gather data, right? And data is the most important piece for a commercial regulatory process. If you want to take a reactor concept and scale it out all over the United States, you really want to have tested that somewhere and made sure that it's safe and made sure that you understand the characteristics. So, that's what we're going to be doing. That executive order, you know, essentially takes the legal structure that's there in the DOE and points everybody in the same direction to say, let's do this quickly next year.

So, I want to pull back a little bit further on the geopolitical issues and tensions around...

Well, energy is never geopolitical at all. So, I'm not sure what there is to... No, I'm just kidding.

Interesting. Yeah. Okay, so we are behind a lot, especially against China. Yes. So, China is like 7 to 14 years ahead of us. They are cranking out nuclear reactors.

Absolutely. Yeah.

What exactly is going on there and how far behind are we?

So, China has had a lot of success in building one type of reactor over and over again, which is really what we need to do. In order to do something well, you have to do it often. Right? And if you have the same design that you're doing over and over, you learn a lot, you get better at it over time, you shore up the supply chain, you have a labor base that understands that system. And they've been really successful at that. So, they are ahead of us in terms of scale. Now, they're also ahead of us, unfortunately, in terms of new test reactors. They're also turning on innovative types of reactors that were invented in the United States in the '70s and '80s. And they sort of sat on the shelf and we never really tackled them. We ran into a bunch of regulatory roadblocks and then we never turned them on. And China is now sort of taking those ideas and actually turning them on on the mainland. So, they're being both very experimental and actually figuring out how to scale out. And those are all the ingredients you need to have a mature industry. So, it's a scary place. You know, I think that China understands that energy dominance over the next 100 years is going to be even more important than energy dominance was in the last 100 years. And it was already pretty important, right? So, this is a four-alarm, five-alarm fire type situation that we need to get ahead of immediately. So, Valor is a key part of getting ahead of that.

Is it realistic to think that the US can do this alone or will we have to work with allies?

You know, I was talking to Eric Prince about that last night. He pointed out that Willow Run, which is about 20 minutes from here, is an airport here. And from about 1941 to 1944, that airport cranked out about 8,600 B-24 Liberators. That's one aircraft every 63 minutes. Right? So, when the United States recognizes that there's a problem, we get to work and we can solve it really quickly. So, I think that we can absolutely solve this. It's solvable through, you know, very smart people who are working together with private capital and getting it done. And I think that we have the ingredients to come back right now. I think there's a window of time in which we could actually catch up and we can get ahead. So, you know, we're working on that day in and day out.

You were recently on the Shawn Ryan podcast. You've been making rounds in the media circuits.

Have I? I've been trying to let people know the urgency of what we're trying to do. Right? There's a lot of things going on in the United States. We're trying to reindustrialize, you've got tariffs happening, you've got all these different things. Energy is an undercurrent underneath everything. Right? Energy is the determinant factor to whether or not we can have industries here. Right? If you have expensive energy, it doesn't matter how well you're doing the factories and how well you're bringing up the labor and all these different components. If your energy's too expensive, you can't build anything. So, this is a really, really fundamental thing that we need to get right.

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One of the points that you talked with him about, these still go to geopolitical tensions, was about Russia and funding campaigns that affect public perception of nuclear in the US.

Yeah, you know, it's always been funny to me that the environmental lobbies seem to be anti-nuclear. And that's funny to me because nuclear is so obviously, so clearly the best climate solution that you could find, right? So, if you care about the fact that we're putting more CO2 in the atmosphere every single year, and you look at all the options that we have for generation, right? How do we put energy into the grid without putting CO2 into the air? Nuclear is the most obvious solution. It makes an enormous amount of energy and it has an extremely small impact on the environment. It's even smaller than, you know, solar or wind because the physical devices are so small that disposing of those devices takes up less space in a landfill, for example. So, it's obviously the best climate solution. So, why is it that the environmental groups have historically been the groups that are anti-nuclear? I actually believe that, you know, there's been a lot of foreign funding into our environmental groups to try to shut nuclear down because it is such an incredible technology. This was sort of a theory for a long time, but it's actually proven now that this did happen in Europe over the last 10 years. So, Russian groups funded far-left environmental groups in Germany to shut the reactors down in order, you know, to make it so that Germany would have to buy Russian gas, right? And this is something that's a matter of public record now. There's a big investigation into it. So, I think that that's probably something that's happened a lot more than we recognize. And fortunately, I think that now that we're sort of in the age of the internet, age of the information, it's harder to pull plays like that, right? It kind of doesn't last for that long. You have enough people that Google, you know, how large is nuclear waste or how safe are nuclear reactors, and they start to actually read about it and understand it, and it doesn't last for that long. Eventually, you know, people kind of wake up to it. So, I think it's a great time to be building.

What do you think the biggest misconceptions are around nuclear waste and reactors? I think... Is there still... are there still misconceptions? I feel like I don't know, maybe I'm in an echo chamber, but I feel like everybody's on the same page.

Yeah. I think there's definitely a little bit of a bubble in, let's say, American tech or, you know, American reindustrialization. And that's because I think we're all very, very tuned in with energy needs, right? We all recognize that energy is so important for what all of us need to do. Reindustrialization, artificial intelligence, national security, all of these things are energy issues. So, I think that we're a little bit more tuned into it, but there is still pretty broad-based misunderstanding of nuclear and especially nuclear waste. I like to point out to people that if you took all of the nuclear waste ever generated inside the United States, right? And by the way, we generate a lot of power with nuclear today. About 20% of our power comes from nuclear. But if you took all of that waste over the last 70 years, it would not fill up an Olympic-size swimming pool. All of it. Right? So, we're talking about a very, very small amount of physical material. And when you have a small amount of physical material, it's actually very easy to protect, right? So, we can encase it in concrete, we put it in safe places, and the comparison to that is, you know, carbon in the atmosphere and particulate matter in the atmosphere when we talk about oil and gas. And oil and gas is fantastic. I love the industry. I think that it's powered humanity to this point. But if you do a comparison here, oil and gas puts about 600,000 sedan-sized blocks of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Right? So, imagine 6,000 Toyota Camrys of solid carbon into the atmosphere every year. If you replaced all of that power output with nuclear, you would have one sedan-sized block of nuclear waste encased in concrete, safely stored underground. Right? So, it's just such a power-dense technology that we really know how to deal with the waste of it, and we don't know how to deal with the waste from other forms of generation.

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I want to talk about more of security around these facilities. With geopolitical threats, have you had to think about this when you're building out your reactors, when you think about your office, like all that kind of stuff? Like how sensitive do you have to be around privacy, protection, resilience?

Yeah, absolutely. So, off the bat, you know, we have a lot of security at Valor, you know, physical security, cybersecurity. And these are really good things to be practicing. Now, there's two things to notice here. One is our rivals are far ahead of us today, right? And when you're building in defense tech or deep tech or these new technology areas, you're often worried about China copying our IP and, you know, scaling it up. And these things have happened in nuclear. Unfortunately, they've happened so much that China's ahead of us at this point, right? There's a certain extent to which China doesn't actually want my IP because they have something better already running in the mainland, right? So, there's a lot of catch-up that we have to do before we even get to that point. Now, we practice it anyway, and we, you know, we practice these good cybersecurity practices because eventually we will surpass them. But I like to highlight like we have a lot of catching up to do before that's even, you know, the main problem. Now, on the physical security of the plants and cybersecurity of the plants, there's different types of reactors. Some nuclear reactors are vulnerable to meltdown if they're operated poorly, right? So, if you had a cyberattack on a reactor, you could feasibly see a meltdown scenario if the, you know, control rods were operated incorrectly or, you know, various things were to occur. There's another type of reactor you can build called a Gen 4 reactor, where the worst that somebody could do is turn it off. Right? So, we get this question a lot, what would happen if a terrorist, you know, accessed the control room in your facility? And the answer is they could turn the reactor off, and that'd be kind of annoying. We'd have to turn it back on again. So, this is a difference in technology. It's, you know, generation four reactors are incredibly passively safe. You basically can't make them melt down. It's, you know, a pure physics issue. So, that's the type of reactor that we build.

Right. This might be a wild question because this is so physical and it's in energy and industrials, right? Okay, so we're seeing AGI come into the scene. Maybe you call it super intelligence now, whatever you want to call it. But how does AGI and AI advancements, how do those affect getting nuclear online sooner and all of these reactors up and running?

So, this is probably a controversial statement, and, you know, investors probably really, really want to believe that AI is going to like help us build a ton of reactors. I actually think that if you're looking for an investment that is protected from AGI, it's something like this where it's extremely physical, you're bending steel, you're stacking blocks, you're building plants, you're laying concrete. It's going to be a long time before AI touches that level of the physical world. There are a lot of things that are going to be automated first before that. The other thing I'll say is that our customers are going to be data centers, right? They're going to be people who want to actually power the AI. So, interestingly, nuclear is sort of like the derivative to AI. If you believe that AI is going to go vertical, you should probably invest in nuclear. You know, because A, you're going to power it. B, you're going to be very insulated from, you know, the deflationary effects of that. And yeah, of course we use LLMs and these sorts of things to help us do work management and help us control information and these sorts of things. But at the end of the day, this is a matter of we need to bend a lot of steel, we need to weld it together, we need to stack the blocks.

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Yeah, absolutely. So, nuclear is generally presented as high uptime. Right? So, reactors run 24/7 and they run for a long time. You only have to refuel them every 18 months. They last forever. And, you know, very safe as well. Right? So, it's an extremely safe way to make energy. But then expensive. Right? That's the trade-off that's presented, you know, presented. So, you're going to pay a lot more, but you get stability and you get safety. I think I actually think that's totally wrong. Nuclear will be all three of those. It will be the safest form of power generation. It will be the most reliable form of power generation and it will be the cheapest. And I think this is a very techno-capital observation, right? Like techno-capital eliminates trade-offs of that kind all the time. You think that you've sort of hit the efficient edge of a technology and then somebody says like, 'No, actually this is better on all three categories.' And that's exactly what nuclear has the opportunity to be here. So, we expect the plants will essentially be the safest, cleanest, and cheapest form of energy across every category. And that's really what we need to accelerate in the next 100 years. If we want to see energy that's 10 times cheaper than today, you really need a breakthrough like that.

What are you most looking forward to for the next 12 months for Valor?

We're going to go split an atom for the first time. Yeah, it's going to be very, very exciting. I actually have a counter on my phone the deadline to when we need to split an atom in order to hit this executive order. So, yeah, we've got a lot of work in front of us.

Are you feeling any pressure from this presidency term to get as much accomplished as possible because we don't know what the next one will bring?

I would just say that this administration has thrown down the gauntlet to the nuclear industry and said, 'All right, you've been complaining for, you know, 20 years that this thing is wrong and this thing is broken.' And the Trump administration just said, 'All right, we're fixing all of that. Let's see if you got it.' Right? Let's see if you actually have the goods. So, yeah, the gauntlet's been thrown down and we're working very hard.

Caltech has a market out right now that there's currently a 13% chance that the US grants a new license for a nuclear reactor. Do you think that's realistic?

I will absolutely take the other side of that bet. I think you have to define what they mean by that. If it's an NRC license or if it's a DOE license, right? Those are different things. We're going for DOE authorization next year and split the first atom. So, maybe there's some clarification on that. NRC license, you know, we'll see. We'll see on that one. There's always fine print.

Yeah, it looks like NRC. Okay, NRC license. That's an interesting one.

You know, that's also not a bad bet either, I would say. There's a couple companies working on NRC certifications. I mean, look at the United States, you know, sometimes we get in front of ourselves and we trip on our own feet and we kind of get lost in the bureaucracy, but when urgency, you know, is knocking at the door and we recognize that there are real problems, we know how to get up and move. And I think that's happening right now in nuclear. So, yeah, I'd take the other side of that.

What odds would you put against it?

NRC, you know, this is not under my control, you know, as a CEO because we're going through the DOE license. So, you're really asking about whether or not my competitors are going to be able to do this in time. And that's always a hard bet to take. But I would take, you know, 99 to 1 that we turn on a reactor next year.

Lastly, as we close out, what do you think the largest source of global primary energy consumption will be by 2030?

2030? Yeah. That's not very much time.

No.

It'll still be around like eight or nine percent nuclear. Solar's going to tick up a little bit, but honestly, oil and gas is growing as well. I think what's more interesting is like 2050. Where are we at 2050? I do believe that most of the world is nuclear at that point. I think that there will be some solar, but if Valor is successful at building the cheapest form of energy that's also the safest and also the most reliable and also comes online fastest, there's no reason why we won't scale all around the world and make the world's energy. And that is the mission of the company is to make the world's energy. So, let's say 75% by 2050 is Valor. And then another 25%, you know, we'll let people sort out. It'll be the rest.

Yeah, that's the rest of them. Yeah. Go global.

I mean, listen, like, you know, SpaceX, you know, launches 80% of the world's, you know, kilograms to orbit, right? You have these power laws about when you find a technology that is actually scalable and is actually cheap, it takes everything. Right? And that's very much our intention here.

Amazing. Well, Isaiah, it was a pleasure to have you on as the number one first guest of the day.

I win. We have like 50 more of these.

Just probably close it up now, right? Yeah, let's go. Yeah.