Nuclear energy is either a dirty phrase or a holy grail, depending on whom you ask. For the energy startup Valar Atomics and its founder, Isaiah Taylor, it’s the latter. Valar announced in March, one month after raising a $19 million seed round, that it was partnering with the Philippines’ Nuclear Research Institute to develop nuclear energy for the Pacific nation. Then, in April, Valar joined multiple states and reactor companies in a lawsuit against America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission, alleging that the agency’s rules are too onerous to allow for small-scale testing and innovation. In May, following President Donald Trump’s executive order to reform nuclear-reactor testing, Taylor announced that Valar will partner with the state of Utah to build a pilot advanced reactor at the San Rafael Energy Research Center by Independence Day next year.
The American Conservative caught up with 26-year-old Taylor in a phone interview to hear about Valar’s whirlwind past few months.
What is the elevator pitch for Valar Atomics?
Valar Atomics is focused on making the world’s energy with nuclear power. We do that by making a small modular reactor. It's a very safe, very simple reactor design, and we essentially make a small version of it, and then we make many of them…. We do this in something we call a gigasite. A gigasite is essentially a large-scale site where we create hundreds of the same reactor over and over. That allows us to achieve economies of scale and get our reactors very cheap. Then we create tons of power, and we use that power for data centers and heavy industry and metal refining and all the sorts of things that are going to help reindustrialize.
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