No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor
At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo talk to the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders about the biggest questions: How far away is AGI? What markets are at risk for disruption? How will commerce, culture, and society change? What’s happening in state-of-the-art in research? “No Priors” is your guide to the AI revolution. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com.
Sarah Guo is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. She spent nearly a decade incubating and investing at venture firm Greylock Partners.
Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. He was co-founder of Color Health, Mixer Labs (which was acquired by Twitter). He has invested in over 40 companies now worth $1B or more each, and is also author of the High Growth Handbook.
Show Notes
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While the rest of the nuclear industry still relies on simulations and paper designs, Valar Atomics is busy splitting atoms. In fact, they just powered an NVIDIA Blackwell chip directly with a live nuclear reactor in order to power the world’s first nuclear powered website. Sarah Guo joins Valar Atomics founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor on-site at their California headquarters to talk about how Valar is shifting nuclear energy from the theoretical to the practical by building and perfecting reactors via hardware iteration. Isaiah discusses why the US stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970s, and how Valar utilized a little-known pathway via the Department of Energy, revived by a Trump administration executive order, to successfully develop and run their advanced reactor. He also shares Valar’s strategy for vertical integration, their venture-backed approach to financing, their giga-site plans, and why he believes cheap, abundant atomic energy has the power to vastly improve the quality of human life.
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Chapters:
– Cold Open
– Isaiah Taylor Introduction
Valar’s Mission and Origin
Why Nuclear Development Stalled
Reviving Nuclear through DoE and Executive Order
Control Room Tour
Misunderstandings About Nuclear
Issues with Reliability
Nuclear is a Hardware Execution Problem
Timeline to Scale Production
Introducing Ward 250
Speed Through Simplicity
AI Drives Nuclear Demand
Running a Reactor with NVIDIA Blackwell
Valar’s Nuclear Conviction
Verticalization as Path to Scale
Valar’s Control Skid
Venture-Backed Nuclear
Gigasite Strategy
CEO Tick Rate
Abundant Energy and Hyper-Techno Industrialism
– Conclusion
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