Manufacturing 1,000s of Nuclear Reactors | Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics

Isaiah Taylor is the Founder of Valar Atomics.Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor.Timestamps:0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 104:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear16:02 Becoming a nuclear company18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself21:55 Obsessing over critical path 24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari 38:07 Running through 1-way doors41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat46:13 Wartime mode48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces1:20:55 Inevitable time1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks1:28:08 Scaling1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States