FIELD NOTES: Isaiah Taylor // Industrializing the Atomic Age

How a self-taught software engineer is revolutionizing nuclear energy with an industrial approach to reactor manufacturing.

How a self-taught software engineer is revolutionizing nuclear energy with an industrial approach to reactor manufacturing.

In a conversation with Deep Tech Field Notes, Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor discusses his unconventional path to nuclear innovation, while sharing insights on reimagining reactor deployment at industrial scale. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Isaiah Taylor spoke with Deep Tech Field Notes from Los Angeles, where Valar Atomics has just achieved a major technical milestone.

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// KEY STATS //

• Founded: 2023

• Leadership: Isaiah Taylor, Founder & CEO

• Background: Self-taught software engineer, serial entrepreneur

• Focus: Industrial-scale nuclear reactor manufacturing and deployment

• Recent Development: $19M seed round and successful thermal prototype demonstration

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UNLOCKING THE ROCKS

How does a teenage software entrepreneur end up building nuclear reactors?

"I've known since I was very young that I wanted to make thousands of machines," Taylor reflects. "I had different ideas about what those machines would be - airplanes, bionic eyes, reactors. But I didn't think nuclear was worth pursuing because I figured it was already covered. It wasn't until high school that I realized nuclear had stagnated and needed disruption."

The path to nuclear innovation started with an unconventional mindset shaped by family history. Taylor's great-grandfather was a Manhattan Project physicist who went on to pioneer technology still used at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "My great-grandfather was both an amazing scientist and a devout Christian his entire life," Taylor explains. "That has always been a very logical unity to me. A lot of the pioneers of modern science were devout Christians who explicitly attributed their scientific curiosity to trying to understand the nature of God and the universe."

This philosophical foundation informed Taylor's approach to energy innovation: "My Christian philosophy is that God created the world fundamentally good. When we talk about making technology, we're taking something good that's preexisting and hidden. Uranium in the ground is like goodness that God left there for us to unlock. We just have to make machines which unlock it."

That realization led to a deep dive into why nuclear energy hadn't become the dominant global power source. "I researched enough to know I could fix this problem," Taylor explains. "Initially I thought I needed to follow Elon's path - start a company, sell it, start another, until you have enough capital. I grew up very poor and didn't even know raising money was a thing. By 16, I was making six figures coding in my parents' basement, which funded my first startup at 17."

Coming from outside the nuclear industry proved advantageous. "I didn't need a certain answer to come out the other side," Taylor notes. "When you're surrounded by people in the industry and tied to it in your career path, you need what you're doing to be somewhat standardized. I came at it completely from the outside, starting with the question: what's the cheapest way to make energy on earth in history? I looked at everything - geothermal, solar, wind, fusion. I was willing for it to not be nuclear. But when I actually dug in and understood each system from first principles, I realized nuclear really is the cheapest way to make energy we've ever seen as a species. We've just built it wrong as an industry."

BREAKING THE ARTISAN'S CURSE

What's wrong with how we build nuclear reactors today?

"The old way was building unique, one-of-kind mega construction projects," Taylor notes. "The SMR (Small Modular Reactor) movement tried to fix this by manufacturing standardized units. But SMRs only solve half the problem - they don't address site costs, which are the majority of nuclear expenses. In fact, they make it worse by spreading smaller reactors across more sites."

Taylor breaks down the economics: "Most of the cost of nuclear is not the reactor itself - it's the site. When you're making SMRs, you're making smaller reactors with lower power ratings, spreading these out onto even more sites. If you imagine the ratio of power to site, old world nuclear actually had more power on fewer sites than SMR nuclear. SMRs have this model of putting two or three 100-200 megawatt reactors on a site for 600 megawatts total. Old World Nuclear was putting a couple gigawatts on the site."

Valar's approach represents a fundamental rethinking of nuclear deployment. "We're the anti-SMR SMR company," Taylor says. "We believe in mass-scale sites - tens of gigawatts in one place. You get manufacturing benefits but put those SMRs right next to each other, dozens to hundreds in a row. This lets you amortize site costs across much more power and reuse infrastructure."

The advantages compound with scale. "Just take security as an example," Taylor explains. "Every nuclear power plant needs physical security - armed guards to prevent break-ins. The cost of physical security doesn't scale linearly with power. If your reactor is three times more powerful, you don't need three times more security. And if your reactor is a tenth as powerful, you still need the same amount of security. The more power you put onto the site, the more you reduce the proportional cost of these site factors."

This rethinking of nuclear economics reveals a crucial insight: the industry's focus on reactor innovation has been solving the wrong problem. By zeroing in on site costs rather than just reactor design, Valar has found a path to make nuclear power dramatically cheaper through industrial scaling. "The gigasite model changes everything," Taylor notes. "Instead of spreading out our costs, we concentrate them. Instead of making reactors smaller, we make sites bigger. It's the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing - and that's precisely why it works."

FROM SEED TO CHAIN REACTION

What can you accomplish with a $19M seed round in nuclear?

"We just hit our major milestone - turning on Ward 0," Taylor reveals. "We've built a nuclear reactor one-to-one. You could actually put uranium in the system we've built and it would split atoms. For testing, we use silicon carbide to mimic the heat signature and power levels of a nuclear reaction while we work through licensing."

The prototype is far from simple. "What we've developed is genuinely the most sophisticated thermal prototype ever created by a private company," Taylor explains. "We put silicon carbide in the reactor core rather than uranium, then put voltage through it to mimic what a nuclear reaction does in a graphite core. It has the identical heat signature and can reach the same power levels and temperature profiles. The rest is actual physical hardware - we're testing our helium pump, pressurization systems, heat transport system, controls, and emergency scenarios. We're even working with the Philippines government to operate this test unit as if it's a real nuclear reactor and establish operating procedures."

The speed of development is unprecedented. "The normal benchmark for a nuclear company is getting to a thermal prototype at year 4-5, having spent north of $100M," Taylor explains. "We did this for about $12M in ten months. My context for nuclear comes from my great grandfather - the Chicago Pile 1, the world's first reactor, was built under football stands in 8 months. When people say it takes 4 years to create a thermal reference plant, I just say 'I don't think so.'"

Taylor attributes this speed to mindset as much as technology. "Nobody's ever accomplished anything they didn't believe was possible. If you don't think something is achievable, you won't aim for it and won't take the necessary steps to allow you to do it. A lot of people just by default assume things take a certain amount of time. Then that's what they aim for, and that's what happens. People will take as much time as you give them, and that works in both directions - long and short."

POWER WHERE OTHERS AREN'T LOOKING

How do you approach market entry differently?

"The customer stack probably starts with data centers," Taylor notes. "They need high volumes of local power, and we can use microgrids without grid connection. But as soon as possible, we move into synthetic fuels. If you have the cheapest energy in the world, you can have the cheapest hydrogen, and then make the cheapest fuel - diesel, jet fuel, gasoline - faster and cheaper than oil refineries."

The implications are massive. "The cost of synthetic fuel really boils down to the cost of your hydrogen, which boils down to your internal LCOE (levelized cost of energy)," Taylor explains. "Once you internalize what that means, you realize that Valar Atomics could be a trillion dollar company. To be able to make the world's oil and gas cheaper than refining oil - forget carbon neutral for a minute - just cheaper alone is a massive unlock for humanity. To be able to just make fuel wherever we want."

BIRTHING THE ATOMIC AGE

Why are climate policies backfiring on American industry?

"If you want to transition from oil for climate reasons and don't care about cost, that's one approach - but you won't convince the entire world to significantly reduce their standard of living to save the planet," Taylor argues. "A much more effective approach is to make energy both cheaper and carbon-neutral at the same time. Nuclear is the only source where both are true. Renewables are not cheaper than oil and gas. Nuclear is."

The current approach to emissions reduction has unintended consequences. "Our electricity in the United States has gotten a lot more expensive, especially industrial electricity, because we've decided to move away from coal," Taylor notes. "You'd think that reduced our climate emissions, but that's not what happened. Our industries that relied on coal moved to China, who still burns coal - and dirtier coal at that. So it's the same amount of carbon, maybe worse, and we gutted entire industries that used to thrive in the United States. These are the types of really bad trade-offs we've been making. Nuclear cuts through all the nonsense - it's automatically carbon neutral from day one, and it's just cheaper."

THE TRILLION DOLLAR EQUATION

What does success look like in 2030?

"By 2030, I hope we have a gigasite and we're building many reactors on it," Taylor shares. "But that's just the beginning. Valar Atomics has the potential to be one of the most exciting companies of the 21st century. There's such an enormous long tail of incredible things you can build on top of extremely cheap energy campuses - metals electrolysis, advanced manufacturing, hydrogen production, advanced materials, industrial heat. And it all starts with the gigasite."

The company's name itself hints at this world-changing ambition, sharing its name with Tolkien's Valar - the powers that shaped Middle-earth. "I believe that God created the world to be abundant," Taylor reflects. "Cheap energy is the best lever I have to unleash the inflection of technological blessings which have been held back from us since the 70's. Growing up and hearing stories of my great grandfather's contributions as a physicist on the Manhattan project gave me an obsession with energy, and a deep frustration with what nuclear could have been. But after years of research, I've found a way to unlock the rocks and give the USA the benefits of nuclear power, while at the same time building a trillion dollar energy company."

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// FIELD NOTES //

LESSONS LEARNED:

• Outside Perspective Enables Innovation - Coming from software rather than nuclear engineering allowed Taylor to question industry assumptions

• Speed Through Belief - "Nobody's ever accomplished anything they didn't believe was possible"

• Economics Drive Adoption - Making clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels is more effective than moral arguments

• Site Costs Matter More Than Reactor Costs - The key to nuclear economics is amortizing site infrastructure across more power generation

TACTICAL TAKEAWAYS:

• Focus on Fundamentals - Understanding the basic physics and economics enabled a fresh perspective on reactor design

• Challenge Industry Timelines - Historical examples like the Manhattan Project show faster development is possible

• Start with Clear Use Cases - Data centers provide an ideal early market for nuclear microgrids

• Build for Scale from Day One - The gigasite model enables natural progression from single to multiple reactors

FOR FOUNDERS:

• Look for Hidden Assumptions - Sometimes the biggest opportunities come from questioning "everyone knows that..."

• Speed Changes the Game - Moving 5-10x faster than industry standard creates its own competitive advantage

• Focus on Economics First - Making clean technology cheaper than alternatives is the fastest path to adoption

• Think in Systems - The most valuable innovations often come from reimagining system architecture, not just individual components

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Editor's Note: In an industry where innovation typically means multi-billion dollar megaprojects and decade-long timelines, Valar Atomics is bringing Silicon Valley speed to nuclear power. By reimagining reactors as industrial products rather than construction projects, they've accomplished in 10 months what traditionally takes nuclear startups 4-5 years and $100M+ to achieve. Their mission to build nuclear gigafactories represents more than just technical innovation - it's a bid to restart humanity's century-long march of making energy cheaper, unlocking everything from AI compute to industrial decarbonization. To follow their development and learn about opportunities to join their team, visit https://www.valaratomics.com/

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