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Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI
Josh:
What's up everyone, Josh here. You are about to listen to an episode featuring
Josh:
Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valor Atomics, a company dead set on building
Josh:
safe and modular nuclear reactors to solve the single most important resource
Josh:
problem in the world, energy.
Josh:
Isaiah's nuclear roots run deep with his great-grandfather being in the Manhattan
Josh:
Project and Isaiah himself attempting to split the atom all on his own all these decades later.
Josh:
And get this, they did it all, both at the age of 24.
Josh:
And speaking of splitting the atom, Since this episode was originally recorded,
Josh:
Isaiah and the Valor team did just that, achieving a milestone called cold criticality,
Josh:
which occurs when uranium, the isotope they use as nuclear fuel,
Josh:
it achieves a self-sustaining reaction.
Josh:
It's the first venture-backed company ever in the world to split the atom and
Josh:
do this. It's incredible.
Josh:
This was an episode that David and I recorded early on in Limitless' history.
Josh:
And since then, so many more new people have joined us and we wanted to enjoy
Josh:
Thanksgiving with our family. So
Josh:
we figured it would be a perfect time to resurface this gem of an episode.
Josh:
And when asking Isaiah to come on, we were hoping to create the canonical energy
Josh:
episode as to why it matters so much for everything we do.
Josh:
And after listening back, it's still holding strong. And I hope that it will
Josh:
also leave you feeling inspired the same way that it did for me.
Josh:
Isaiah is a total badass. If you're listening to this, I highly advise switching
Josh:
over to YouTube or Spotify because he is recording literally right in front of his nuclear reactor.
Josh:
It is so cool. It's an amazing episode. And if you enjoy it,
Josh:
or you have a friend that you think would be interested please share it
Josh:
with them it's the best way that we can grow and we're so appreciative of
Josh:
everyone who was listening to the first version of this and who
Josh:
is listening to the new version of it right now because it has been an incredible
Josh:
journey if you can support us in any way by sharing the episode liking subscribing
Josh:
on whatever platform you're listening on leave a nice review if you enjoyed
Josh:
but without further ado let's get into this amazing amazing category defining
Josh:
episode with Isaiah Taylor I really hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
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 humans, we are creating entropy as
Isaiah:
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 things in the ground.
Isaiah:
But there's a lot of stuff in the ground. And not only is there a lot of stuff
Isaiah:
in the ground, there's stuff on other planets and in asteroids.
Isaiah:
And the universe is fundamentally limitless as far as we know.
Isaiah:
The actual limiting factor in all of these things is how much energy do you
Isaiah:
have to transform the world around you into what you want?
Isaiah:
And, you know, that's the only irreversible thing, right? If you use copper
Isaiah:
in an electric car, you can always use that copper again, right?
Isaiah:
But the energy in that electric car will never be used again,
Isaiah:
right? You've created entropy and that's it's fundamental.
Isaiah:
So I actually view energy is 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. And that that might
Isaiah:
help us extrapolate a little bit.
Isaiah:
Right. So the this the sort of like history of what the world looks like in
Isaiah:
society is essentially three pillars getting better over time.
Isaiah:
Okay, so the three pillars of any product, any physical good,
Isaiah:
are essentially energy, intelligence, and dexterity, right?
Isaiah:
So 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?
Isaiah:
So it's the intelligence of the people at 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 that
Isaiah:
are running CAD, you know, even the energy to fuel the designers brains as they
Isaiah:
eat food, you know, and they go throughout their days.
Isaiah:
So every single thing is made of energy intelligence, intelligence and dexterity. And, um.
Isaiah:
What's interesting right now is that we're getting a clear
Isaiah:
abundance in the intelligence and dexterity part
Isaiah:
right so ai you know hitting an inflection really
Isaiah:
means that intelligence is becoming somewhat default free uh dexterity will
Isaiah:
also become default free as we get more and more robotics and so what does the
Isaiah:
world look like when we have abundant energy it's essentially fueling those
Isaiah:
things in an inflected manner which means everything is free uh what does it
Isaiah:
mean when everything's free.
Isaiah:
Well, it means that like the material world is more subject to your imagination,
Isaiah:
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
Isaiah:
in our imaginations into the physical world.
Isaiah:
You know, we might imagine an airplane, but then the translation of that airplane
Isaiah:
into something that can actually fly takes an enormous amount of brainpower
Isaiah:
of thousands of smart people, 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. So what does the world look
Isaiah:
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,
Isaiah:
planet Earth, that might become a little bit crowded, right?
Isaiah:
We will probably have a lot more things running around and planes flying around
Isaiah:
if we're, you know, subject to imagination. And this is where I think space
Isaiah:
exploration becomes very, very interesting.
Isaiah:
And, you know, 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:
and, 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?
Josh:
So I want to take a step back for a second 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 if you actually left high school and then
Josh:
you taught yourself to code and now you're sitting here.
Josh:
And for the listeners at home who aren't listening, Isaiah is sitting in front
Josh:
of a nuclear reactor, in front of their product, 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.
Josh:
In your case, it is very clear to me that they worked out.
Josh:
So can you just kind of explain to me how you wound up sitting here in front
Josh:
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. I attended a small liberal arts school for
Isaiah:
a couple of months while I was
Isaiah:
working 80-hour weeks doing software engineering. Didn't last very long.
Isaiah:
I was curious to read a lot of literature, and I've always been interested in language.
Isaiah:
And I realized a few months into it, I cared a lot more about the work that
Isaiah:
I was doing than 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, but I also am on a mission and I
Isaiah:
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,
Isaiah:
that you 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 they see,
Isaiah:
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.
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 be scratched anyway,
Isaiah:
except waking up every single day and working on it, you will probably find
Isaiah:
easier and more efficient ways to access that information and start actually
Isaiah:
building than going to school. And so that's what I did.
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. Man, if I had had access to ChatGPT
Isaiah:
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 Chappachea Petit 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 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 sense to you.
David:
Maybe you can walk us through that train of thought as to why you are just pilled
David:
by nuclear specifically, because there's other ways to produce energy.
David:
Solar, I still feel like, has a lot of juice left to squeeze in that whole industry.
David:
You could have gone and solved the solar problem, but you chose nuclear.
David:
Maybe you can just walk us through that choice.
Isaiah:
I obviously had a bias toward nuclear.
Isaiah:
My great-grandfather was on the Manhattan Project I've grown up thinking about
Isaiah:
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. and um,
Isaiah:
in the journey of trying to understand why i i actually
Isaiah:
became anti-nuclear pill and i was like well you know
Isaiah:
this is an amazing technology but humanity is not ready for it and it's not
Isaiah:
happening and you know there's these complexities to it which make it impossible
Isaiah:
um 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 and i don't
Isaiah:
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 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 figure that out.
Isaiah:
And so I actually, you know, backed all the way up to the drawing board.
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.
Isaiah:
And maybe for personal reasons that I 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. So what is the best form of energy?
Isaiah:
And that drove me to every form of energy generation.
Isaiah:
I really started from first principles and looked at how have humans gotten energy in the past?
Isaiah:
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:
And at the end of the day, I came to a couple of fundamental conclusions.
Isaiah:
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 at scale,
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
Okay, 747 costs more than an iPhone. And that's a pretty fundamental law.
Isaiah:
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 in how much things cost,
Isaiah:
how big they are, how many of them you make.
Isaiah:
Okay. So back, but the most fundamental one is how big is it?
Isaiah:
So an ideal energy machine is quite small and makes a lot of power.
Isaiah:
So then you back up and you say, well, okay, well, what drives the size of an
Isaiah:
energy machine across all of these different, uh, you know, types of energy
Isaiah:
generation, you have geothermal, you have solar, you have wind pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground,
Isaiah:
nuclear fusion, all these different things.
Isaiah:
And what I did is, you know, you might laugh at this a little bit But I looked
Isaiah:
at all of the different energy generating machines out there and I said, how big are they?
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
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.
David:
It's relatively small in the grand 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.
Isaiah:
So hydro is not power dense, unfortunately.
Isaiah:
Hydroelectric dams are freaking enormous. They're gigantic.
David:
They're large, yeah.
Isaiah:
The Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest concrete structure ever built by
Isaiah:
humans on Earth. Now, it also makes a lot of energy.
Isaiah:
But if you actually do the cubic meters to power output, dams are actually pretty bad.
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.
Isaiah:
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,
Isaiah:
that refines for it, that transports it, that stores it, puts it in the tank.
Isaiah:
So once you do all that math, you know, even though a rocket engine or jet engine
Isaiah:
is the most energy dense thing we built, you know, built yet,
Isaiah:
the apparatus to source the hydrocarbons is actually, you know, 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, it's too much to be productive. But what this tells you is that fission,
Isaiah:
you know, and fusion, but we'll talk about that in a second.
Isaiah:
Fission is actually as close as we've figured
Isaiah:
out how to get so far to this like almost
Isaiah:
infinite power source in a box of a of
Isaiah:
an abstract size right and it turns out for for
Isaiah:
fission that the size of the box is not super
Isaiah:
correlated with the power output right so like
Isaiah:
the reason that we make you know you know fusion machines
Isaiah:
or fission machine machines of a certain size honestly has
Isaiah:
more to do with safety than it has to do with like total power that
Isaiah:
you can get out of the box right you know the reason that we
Isaiah:
make things bigger or smaller in the fission world has to
Isaiah:
do with how safe we want to make them right because you you take
Isaiah:
this to the fundamental limit and uh you know you have
Isaiah:
a bomb right which is an enormous amount of energy in a very small box but it's
Isaiah:
unsafe and then you go the exact opposite direction which would be something
Isaiah:
like the machine behind me which is very very safe and it's much lower power
Isaiah:
density 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 a nearly infinite energy producing,
Isaiah:
uh box of almost any any size with uh
Isaiah:
with nuclear fission beyond a certain minimum there's a there's sort
Isaiah:
of a minimum size but around that minimum size like you
Isaiah:
can make a box and makes the power of the you know the entire world um and then
Isaiah:
everything from that point to practicality is a matter of essentially safety
Isaiah:
engineering um okay so what this means and by the way like the fundamental reasons
Isaiah:
for this is that uranium itself is just unbelievably energy dense, right?
Isaiah:
So the kilowatt hours per kilogram
Isaiah:
on uranium is about 23 million kilowatt hours per kilogram versus,
Isaiah:
I'm going to get this number wrong, but I think it's somewhere around 40 or
Isaiah:
50 kilowatt hours per kilogram in oil and gas, right, in a hydrocarbon fuel.
Isaiah:
And so you have literally millions of times more energy density in uh in fission
Isaiah:
now take this to like something like solar right what's the what's the power
Isaiah:
density of solar another way you can think about this is uh here's here's a
Isaiah:
trick question what's bigger a nuclear reactor or a solar panel i.
Josh:
Would guess solar by a couple orders of magnitude 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 it's actually not true.
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
It's hard to predict in the limit.
Isaiah:
But today, at least, you know, solar is about three orders of magnitude bigger
Isaiah:
in terms of physical mass than nuclear.
Isaiah:
So if our North Star is that a, you know, an energy machine ought to be small,
Isaiah:
because small things are cheap.
Isaiah:
Um, nuclear is, is the solution, right? So this was, this was sort of my conclusion
Isaiah:
on, on all of this, uh, like first principles thinking and research is,
Isaiah:
is essentially that fission will create the cheapest energy on earth.
Isaiah:
If we can figure out how to do it safely and we can figure out how to do it
Isaiah:
legally and in a way that the public, you know, will be happy with,
Isaiah:
because even if you have a safe machine and the public thinks it's not a safe machine,
Isaiah:
you know, you still haven't really solved the, like the fundamental problem,
Isaiah:
at least in a, in a short timeframe.
Isaiah:
Um, so the second conclusion that I had, and this is really what led to,
Isaiah:
to starting Valor is that if you really want to make the cheapest energy on
Isaiah:
earth, you're going to do nuclear fission, but you're going to do it pretty
Isaiah:
differently than how it's been done before.
Isaiah:
Um, and specifically you want to do it kind of in the middle of nowhere where
Isaiah:
you have sort of a safe operating place for fission, you know, out in the desert,
Isaiah:
out in the middle of nowhere with as many safety constraints as you want to
Isaiah:
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
Isaiah:
know that fission wins the the smallness thing right very
Isaiah:
small machine makes a ton of power the second is how many
Isaiah:
you make and so these are the two fundamental you know decisions
Isaiah:
that went into starting this company is that we're going to make fission reactors
Isaiah:
because they're small and we're going to make a lot of them because making many
Isaiah:
of a thing makes it 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 uh they're
Isaiah:
fission reactors so they're very
Isaiah:
power dense, and we're going to make the cheapest energy in the world.
David:
Inside of your answer, I feel like there's just a lot of work being done with
David:
the idea that there's just not a lot of extra baggage going around 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 I think you would just dismantle each one of those things,
David:
talking 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.
Isaiah:
Like it's absolutely true for oil and gas, right? So it's almost impossible
Isaiah:
today to completely verticalize an oil and gas company, right?
Isaiah:
Because the source of your oil continues to shift.
Isaiah:
And so unless you're in like the continuous real estate business where you are
Isaiah:
constantly 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?
Isaiah:
Well, it looks like having a patch of land where steel comes in and graphite
Isaiah:
comes in and energy comes out and a bit of uranium, right?
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
You could say that you have this solar plant, which is similarly structured,
Isaiah:
which has silicon coming in and 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, you know,
Isaiah:
this is sort of the math for solar.
Isaiah:
Now, fusion is an interesting part of this as well.
Isaiah:
People will say, well, okay, fusion is even more power dense, right?
Isaiah:
Because, you know, 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:
What is like, let's characterize a fusion box. How good is that thing on the
Isaiah:
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, right?
Isaiah:
So a fusion machine is actually larger per power, because it's harder 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 solar.
Isaiah:
I thought it was, you know, I actually thought geothermal for a while 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 the world around?
David:
How has the environment changed to make the question of right now be relevant?
Isaiah:
So I think that we made a trade-off in the 70s and 80s that made us think that
Isaiah:
energy wasn't that important for a while.
Isaiah:
And that's one of the fundamental reasons. There's a couple of 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.
Isaiah:
But before AI, energy was really, 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. Now, it turns out that you actually
Isaiah:
really need physical industry as a country, right? A nation needs to be able to build things.
Isaiah:
And in fact, I would say the fundamental thing that an economy does is building things.
Isaiah:
But there's a the flaw in our thinking came from.
Isaiah:
The fact that there are actually like two things involved in making things.
Isaiah:
There's the knowing how to make them, 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 you know we're like let's just export the annoying part which is like the
Isaiah:
real making you know to other places and that's uh highly flawed in the long
Isaiah:
term it maybe is a good idea for about 10 or 15 years in the long term it turns
Isaiah:
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
Isaiah:
forget 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 output of this is like, we forgot how to make cars, right?
Isaiah:
Like we started exporting car production to other places and Japan got really
Isaiah:
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 to make silicon there.
Isaiah:
We used to make chips and then we exported them, you know, somewhere else for
Isaiah:
the actual production because we didn't want the 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 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
Isaiah:
started. Now you've gotten me on a separate soapbox that I care a lot about.
Isaiah:
But but you can't couple do a couple of those things for too long.
Isaiah:
Oh, we were asking why fission now?
Isaiah:
You're right. This is one of those reasons. Right. So we've had a.
Isaiah:
A return of rationality about making things in the physical world is one thing, right?
Isaiah:
So we suddenly realized like, it's actually probably important that we know
Isaiah:
how to make steel, right? It's actually important that 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?
Isaiah:
They can make electricity at 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 the 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.
Isaiah:
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
Isaiah:
woke up 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:
a data center just didn't matter that much because you weren't using that much
Isaiah:
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
Isaiah:
energy and by the way you don't have to believe anything that i've said.
Isaiah:
You know in theory about why nuclear will be cheap you can actually just look
Isaiah:
at the past right so in the early 1970s before three mile island in the united
Isaiah:
states uh nuclear fission,
Isaiah:
not only was the cheapest energy source it remains the cheapest energy that
Isaiah:
humanity has ever experienced.
Isaiah:
Right. So I'm going to say that again. In the early 1970s, the energy that we
Isaiah:
were getting out of nuclear reactors at that time remains the cheapest energy
Isaiah:
that humanity has ever experienced.
Isaiah:
And this is this is adjusting for inflation. Right. I'm not talking about nominal
Isaiah:
1970 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.
Isaiah:
Right now, we've the cheapest energy you can get in the United States today
Isaiah:
is somewhere around five to six cents per kilowatt hour.
Isaiah:
It's a little bit difficult to calculate because of subsidies,
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
50 years ago. 50 years ago. Yeah. And energy should always move the opposite direction, right?
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
So I think there's this massive return to rationality on energy price,
Isaiah:
which 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 had this, you know, intense scariness attached to it, which I think is
Isaiah:
very unjustified, because nuclear is the safest source of energy on Earth.
Isaiah:
If you look at power generated versus human death toll, Nuclear is the safest form of energy on Earth.
Isaiah:
It's even safer than solar, by the way. And we can talk about why that is in a second.
Isaiah:
But one of the interesting things
Isaiah:
that happened was we had these nuclear incidents in the 70s and 80s.
Isaiah:
You had Fukushima, you had Chernobyl, and,
Isaiah:
Those were wildly misunderstood by the public. They, you know,
Isaiah:
if you ask people on the street today, like how many people died in Three Mile Island?
Isaiah:
People will say numbers in the
Isaiah:
hundreds. They'll say numbers in the thousands. Some people say 10,000.
Isaiah:
Zero people is the answer, by the way. Zero people died in Three Mile Island.
Isaiah:
Nobody died. If you ask people about.
David:
What about second order consequences of like 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,
Isaiah:
failed to find a single negative health effect or environmental effect beyond
Isaiah:
the fence of 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, right?
Isaiah:
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:
uh, 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.
Isaiah:
There's maybe, maybe an argument that you can make that one person died, maybe, um.
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. And, you know,
Isaiah:
the social impact of actually evacuating tens of thousands of people was orders
Isaiah:
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. And the fact that this happened
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
Right. We made a really big mistake by evacuating tens of thousands of people
Isaiah:
and by shutting down our nuclear industry. 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,
Isaiah:
you know, the Japanese decision to reverse, you know, 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.
Josh:
But what we're talking about now is the acceleration of the world of atoms,
Josh:
which is the physical space, 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.
Josh:
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.
Josh:
So can you just explain to me kind of what you're, how you're tackling this
Josh:
problem in the world of atoms, giving us energy through Valor?
Isaiah:
Absolutely. So I'll tell you
Isaiah:
about what we built here and then what we're going to build in the future.
Isaiah:
So Ward Zero is the object standing behind me. 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 this built a full nuclear reactor
Isaiah:
you could put uranium in this thing with a couple of minor modifications and
Isaiah:
it would actually turn on and it would split atoms now we don't do that
Isaiah:
because essentially the paperwork to actually do that in the united states would
Isaiah:
take four to five years and we don't have four to five years we have to do this
Isaiah:
immediately right so build a full reactor and then what we put in it instead
Isaiah:
is a silicon carbide silicon carbide is a is a great material it's an extremely
Isaiah:
high temperature ceramic that's also a great electrical resistor.
Isaiah:
And so what that means is that we can basically dump about 12 city blocks of
Isaiah:
Los Angeles power into the core of this reactor, and we can simulate what a
Isaiah:
nuclear fission reaction would be doing inside that core, which is essentially
Isaiah:
generating a ton of heat, right?
Isaiah:
And then what we do is we process that heat in the same way that we would if
Isaiah:
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 one to one with
Isaiah:
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. So that's the next step for the company.
Isaiah:
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 reactor.
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
How big is it? How many you make, right? So we want to make small things that
Isaiah:
you make a ton 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. Nuclear reactors... I'm surprised.
David:
That the answer is reasonably yes at all to be honest
Isaiah:
So i think over time humanity
Isaiah:
continues to use nuclear fission more
Isaiah:
and more and more it becomes the dominant source of energy in
Isaiah:
the world but there's there's two questions at play there's like where does
Isaiah:
the energy come from and then how does it get to you right and those are two
Isaiah:
different things one of the nice things about nuclear fission is that you make
Isaiah:
a ton of cheap energy in a location and then you can you can sort of firewall
Isaiah:
the the nuclear-ness of that from the end user, right?
Isaiah:
And the firewall there is that you transport the energy through a medium and
Isaiah:
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?
Isaiah:
So we'll actually make hydrogen, we'll bond that hydrogen with CO2,
Isaiah:
and we can actually make a synthetic fuel, we can make diesel, gasoline, jet fuel.
Isaiah:
And you might get that in any of the places that you get those those chemicals today.
Isaiah:
And those chemicals should be much cheaper. And so essentially,
Isaiah:
if you think about what we're doing there, we're sort of, we're arbing the physical
Isaiah:
infrastructure of hydrocarbons as a logistics platform.
Isaiah:
And we're plugging nuclear into it, right? And why would you do that,
Isaiah:
by the way? Right. Like 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 like an electrical grid, right?
Isaiah:
You have a bunch of wires connected and you push electrons through and people
Isaiah:
get to consume that energy.
Isaiah:
Hydrocarbons are also a grid. They're a liquid grid, right? They're a network
Isaiah:
of pipelines and trucks and 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, right?
Isaiah:
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 just the ships. Correct. Just ships burning hydrocarbons are consuming
Isaiah:
more energy than the entire global electrical grid. Right.
Josh:
So that is a fun fact.
David:
That is hydrocarbons.
Isaiah:
Hydrocarbons are actually a much larger grid that's more distributed,
Isaiah:
that's more flexible than electrical, 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. you know,
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
It's also the fact that, you know, eventually the CO2 level in the atmosphere
Isaiah:
becomes, you know, too high for, you know, after about 600 ppm,
Isaiah:
your brain function, 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
Isaiah:
energy around, the hydrocarbon grid, I would say is far better,
Isaiah:
far better than the electrical grid and it's far larger and it has potential
Isaiah:
to move 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,
Isaiah:
puts it back in. you take it back out, and you've created a closed loop of CO2, right?
Isaiah:
So you're not adding net new CO2 to the atmosphere.
Isaiah:
Every year, 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 uh into an energetic
Isaiah:
form which is a hydrocarbon right you're ejecting the oxygen out of that now
Isaiah:
you have an unoxidized chemical uh and i'm sorry i know i'm getting a little
Isaiah:
bit uh chemistry you know bored here but uh that is essentially what we're what we're planning to do.
Josh:
Yeah i'm gonna try to ask you this question in a way
Josh:
that that you can explain to normal people where we don't go too deep in
Josh:
chemistry but i'm curious about what makes these reactors different
Josh:
than um i i know people there people
Josh:
the pebble bed reactors are very popular the gen 4 reactors that are coming
Josh:
they're much larger you mentioned modularity is one part of it but what are
Josh:
the benefits aside from the small size aside from the modularity that you are
Josh:
kind of taking advantage of relative to the size is it just size or is there
Josh:
something else that's also going on behind the seeds or within the reactor that
Josh:
that makes it more like it's 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 water reactors.
Isaiah:
But we actually get to manufacture them we get to make
Isaiah:
a ton of them and that makes them cheaper the really unique thing
Isaiah:
here is that these reactors are just a lot hotter right so
Isaiah:
the outlet temperature on these reactors will be around
Isaiah:
800 850 degrees celsius that's compared
Isaiah:
to 300 sometimes 350 degrees celsius
Isaiah:
in a light water reactor that unlocks
Isaiah:
two really important things so the way that you make energy
Isaiah:
in a nuclear reactor traditionally is that you have
Isaiah:
a very hot outlet temperature and then you
Isaiah:
have ambient uh air at a
Isaiah:
certain temperature as well and you can extract energy from the
Isaiah:
difference between those two temperatures right and this is called carno
Isaiah:
efficiency right so you have a hot a t hot and a
Isaiah:
t cold and the difference between those temperatures governs the
Isaiah:
maximum amount of energy they can get out of that for most plants around the
Isaiah:
world this is 20 to 30 percent right of the of the total energy that you can
Isaiah:
get out of that in a hydrocarbon engine which works a similar way you can push
Isaiah:
you know into the mid 30s in you know very efficient.
Isaiah:
Nat gas, combined cycle generators, you can push 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.
Isaiah:
The larger the difference between the cold side and the hot side,
Isaiah:
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 electricity, right?
Isaiah:
So we'll be significantly more
Isaiah:
efficient at producing electricity 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?
Isaiah:
Pure hydrogen, because it's deoxidized, and the fact of 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 process, right?
Isaiah:
You get some water, you combine it with reactor energy, and you get free hydrogen.
Isaiah:
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 hydrogen
Isaiah:
is to start with electricity, right?
Isaiah:
So have a nuclear reactor that spins a turbine, makes electricity,
Isaiah:
run the electricity through an electrolyzer, right, that electrolyzes water,
Isaiah:
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 uh electricity right
Isaiah:
which as we know could be a you know a 60 70
Isaiah:
hit to your efficiency you lose a ton of that energy just making the electricity
Isaiah:
then you have the efficiency hit of running it through an electrolyzer right
Isaiah:
and that electrolyzer also has an efficiency you know related to it as well
Isaiah:
and you're losing a lot of that energy so by the time you've gone from uranium
Isaiah:
fission in a core to chemical potential hydrogen you've lost a ton of energy in that process.
Isaiah:
The other thing is you've added a lot of physical machinery,
Isaiah:
right? So you've added a turbine and a generator and an electrolyzer.
Isaiah:
And again, you want to make 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.
Isaiah:
It'll break down at a certain temperature, right? So at a certain temperature,
Isaiah:
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 is somewhere
Isaiah:
around 1600 to 1800 degrees Celsius.
Isaiah:
That's too hot for us today. 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
Isaiah:
two acids out of that you get a hydriotic acid and sulfuric
Isaiah:
acid and you can actually decompose those two
Isaiah:
acids uh just below the output temperature of
Isaiah:
this reactor right so you can do it around 750 to 800 degrees celsius and they
Isaiah:
will just thermally break down and you get the free hydrogen out of that um
Isaiah:
so what are we left with well you don't need a turbine right because we're not
Isaiah:
making electricity you don't need a generator and you just need a couple of
Isaiah:
tanks of chemicals, right?
Isaiah:
And 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 a tonic chemistry. I'm sorry.
David:
There was a lot of, yeah, chemistry and like matter. that
David:
was a in the contrast of bits versus atoms
David:
that was heavy on the atoms side of things yep and
David:
uh maybe you could just like extrapolate like when we're
David:
talking about atoms and moving atoms and manipulating atoms to produce the things
David:
that we want the conversation starts with a lot of the stuff that you just said
David:
first it starts with the getting the energy producing the energy in order to
David:
manipulate atoms uh josh brought up this contrast of like for the last you know
David:
30 years since the rise of the internet, the rise of Silicon Valley,
David:
the world, humanity, has really been heavily invested into bits.
David:
Like, how do we make the bits in the right order, the ones and zeros in the
David:
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
Isaiah:
about for the last 50 years but we also care about money
Isaiah:
right and it what's been true over the last like 30 to 40 years is like well
Isaiah:
first of all the reason we care about money is generally because of atoms like
Isaiah:
what do people do once they get money from let's say starting a sass company
Isaiah:
and becoming a billionaire well they spend that money on atoms right they they
Isaiah:
start to have a private chef, which makes them delicious food.
Isaiah:
They get a private jet, which like flies them around wherever they want to go.
Isaiah:
They get a beautiful house, they get a boat, right? So I would actually argue
Isaiah:
like the world of atoms has always been the thing 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 a.
Isaiah:
Look, life starts when you're in high school, right? So like,
Isaiah:
when you're in high school, and the options in front of you are opening a laptop,
Isaiah:
and creating something, right, by the end of the day, right, by the end of the day,
Isaiah:
as a 17 year old with a laptop, you can have created something that's functional,
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
And the world of bits 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, right?
Isaiah:
Which is like, it became very hard to do things in the world of atoms in the West.
Isaiah:
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's 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, right?
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 with bits, right?
Isaiah:
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, We're playing video games.
Isaiah:
A lot of software engineers that I know got into software because they were
Isaiah:
playing video games and it gave them this 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 with atoms look like?
Isaiah:
Well, it would look like talking to an AI that runs a 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 a drone
Isaiah:
that can fly you around right and within a
Isaiah:
couple days you you're sitting on it and it's in the air right like that's that's
Isaiah:
the future that we that you know i would like to see and that i think i think
Isaiah:
happens in the next you know 10 to 20 years as dexterity gets cheaper as intelligence
Isaiah:
gets cheaper i don't think i will have to convince many people to be to be tinkering
Isaiah:
with you know the real 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. So when we do have this accessibility,
Josh:
I think about myself and where I could 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
Josh:
humanoid robots and these things can 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, right?
Isaiah:
The reason that you can't just like throw an entire plate of food into the dishwasher
Isaiah:
without having to do any wiping, like, all right, when you're done eating food,
Isaiah:
you should basically just pick up the plate in front of you and like throw it.
Isaiah:
To a machine and the machine does the rest right and
Isaiah:
like the next time you're ready to eat food you like pick up a plate you put
Isaiah:
food on it and you like throw it back to the machine that's how this should
Isaiah:
work and the only reason that it doesn't work that way is actually energy regulation
Isaiah:
it's called energy star there's a there's a fleet of regulations that we've
Isaiah:
put around how our appliances use energy that has essentially forced the industry to,
Isaiah:
create these machines around a function of regulation why
Isaiah:
do like dishwashers and washing machines like
Isaiah:
seem like they don't really get that much better and the user interface
Isaiah:
doesn't change that much it's essentially because we're solving for energy regulations
Isaiah:
right so in an energy abundant future like the
Isaiah:
machines should just do the annoying stuff for you you know we're 50 years from
Isaiah:
the invention of i mean probably more than that of the dishwasher and it's like
Isaiah:
not that different of an experience um so i i would i would say like let's get
Isaiah:
way more creative like what is what does living in a house look like well it
Isaiah:
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 um oh.
Josh:
That makes me
Isaiah:
Real happy and like all of your your clothes
Isaiah:
like your dishwasher your washing machine should not just
Isaiah:
first of all you shouldn't load it like what is loading it that's nonsense like
Isaiah:
i want to throw my clothes at the at the basket and it just comes
Isaiah:
back folded right my my washing machine should fold
Isaiah:
my clothes too and should put them back in the drawer and um
Isaiah:
and you know like that that sort of thing is like very very obvious
Isaiah:
to me maybe that's through humanoids maybe that's through you know just better
Isaiah:
dishwashers and the concept of a dishwasher becomes uh becomes very different
Isaiah:
but all of these things are are unlocked by by energy now something that's very
Isaiah:
motivating to me i talked about the dishwashers and the washing machines because
Isaiah:
that's like an everyman thing but like i'm 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 dreamer vision, where now because we have this new abundant
Josh:
energy unlocked, 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 react 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:
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.
Josh:
When will people start to notice the effects of this cheaper energy?
Josh:
When will we start to have dishwashers that can catch the dishes or robots that
Josh:
can fold our clothes in a way 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:
we're all we're really talking about is like young, crazy people who have some
Isaiah:
like wild vision of how a dishwasher should actually catch your plate and then
Isaiah:
decide to go make that thing a reality.
Isaiah:
And the fundamental motivation for that is twofold.
Isaiah:
Like one, 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
Isaiah:
whatever um the uh becoming
Isaiah:
a centimillionaire and the possibility of imprinting your your will
Isaiah:
on reality has been mostly impossible in the physical world in the west right
Isaiah:
different in in you know other countries in the world specifically china but
Isaiah:
in the west this has not been a path because of not enough energy and also because
Isaiah:
of very stringent regulation that makes it just difficult for innovation to
Isaiah:
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:
He was like, Stowe's should be 100 times better than they are right now,
Isaiah:
right? And that's what he's doing.
Isaiah:
So I think there will 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 a fundamental
Isaiah:
change in how we think about regulation, especially at the federal level,
Isaiah:
that will affect that, you know, 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.
Josh:
So that's a future 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.
Isaiah:
You know, we have a bunch of people on Twitter. I collect Twitter haters. It's very fun.
Isaiah:
And we're like, why does your nuclear reactor look like a video game or like,
Isaiah:
you know, what's going on here? 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.
Isaiah:
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 in the 1970s.
Isaiah:
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 the
David:
first level in Doom and you're on Mars.
David:
While he was talking, a man in a Segway just zipped on by, going like 20 miles an hour.
David:
And it was extremely distracting because it was a little bit surreal just watching
David:
this man zipping around this factory floor with a nuclear power reactor.
Isaiah:
I didn't realize that. That's great. Sometimes when I'm on calls,
Isaiah:
people think that this is a fake background until I see a forklift go by,
Isaiah:
you know, carrying a pallet. And they're like, 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.
Josh:
I understand that you can use them in clusters.
Josh:
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
Isaiah:
Atomics to do today is to go help AI achieve all of its goals, right?
Isaiah:
Help all of the hyperscalers get all the power that they need to win the AI
Isaiah:
race to make sure that the United States of America 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 country, right?
Isaiah:
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.
Josh:
So we're burning lots of fossil 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 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. I think that solar will always have...
Isaiah:
Some applicability in remote places, right? There's always going to be that
Isaiah:
one place that you want to be where there's no infrastructure and you just need
Isaiah:
a bit of power to run some compute, you know, to keep yourself warm.
Isaiah:
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.
Isaiah:
And it's in even hydrocarbons, right? 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.
Isaiah:
And I think that's going to be a much cheaper way. And we're going to it's going
Isaiah:
to be much more abundant.
David:
Isaiah, as we wrap up this podcast, and you get back to work working on a literal
David:
nuclear reactor that's in your background, what, what are you going to do first?
David:
Like, seriously, what's next for you?
David:
What are your priorities for this week for this month?
David:
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 like peaked and
David:
pilled by your mission or just any general advice for what they should do if
David:
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. We keep it spicy.
Isaiah:
You can find Valor Atomics, ValorAtomics.com. 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, and 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.
Josh:
I love the theatrics you do around the company, where you guys had this big unveiling event.
Josh:
And I was like, who are these people that are turning a nuclear reactor event
Josh:
into this big thing? And it was you. And it makes the future more exciting.
Josh:
And just wanted to thank you, because we need more founders like you trying
Josh:
these hard things, improving our world in this life of Adam so that the everyday
Josh:
life becomes a lot more exciting. So we're just super, super grateful.
Josh:
Really glad that you joined us today and 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. Yeah.
David:
Isaiah, thanks for joining us on Limitless.
Isaiah:
Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.