Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics

[Music] Hey all! Welcome back for another exciting and fun episode of Generate. I am, as always, Brett Rand Paul, Senior Director of Nuclear Empower Strategy here at Veriton, joining us today, Nick Morris, new managing director here at Veriton, we're really, really privileged today to have Isaiah Taylor, the CEO and founder of Valoratomics joining us today. Valoratomics is one of several of the new fast-moving sort of nuclear pilot demonstration related projects and companies taking place in the United States today, sort of trying to change nuclear paradigms and discussions in this country that may have, or have been changing, but perhaps slower than some would like. So Isaiah, we're so excited to have you join us here today. Thank you so much for being here to chat with us. Yeah, this is awesome, really privileged to be on here and also appreciate you putting us in the category of fast-moving. I think that speed and velocity and pace is something that has been missing from nuclear for a long time, and it's really important that we actually start building reactors again. So, if anything comes out of this pilot program and out of this period of building, I hope that it's a few reactors running that we all like to learn from. It's nothing else, so yeah, that's great to be here. We super appreciate you being here, but I mean, it's hard for me not to call this fast having been around nuclear technologies and development for 20 years. The things that are going on right now would blow my mind if I could go back in time or talk to professors and mentors of mine years ago. So this is super exciting times, but I think we'll jump right into it, Isaiah, since you kind of already started us down this road. We'll say off the bat, congratulations on your success and your progress so far as well as your role and participation in the Department of Energy's pilot program. Now, understanding that your Ward 250 pilot reactor recently received approval on your documented safety analysis, and it's currently awaiting completion of a readiness review before pushing to achieve criticality in line with the president's July 4 goals. Can you talk to us a little bit about why the pilot program was the right approach for Valoratomics and what it's been like to engage in the program and fulfill milestones, as well as high the pilot program supports your future commercialization rates. For sure, and actually the first thing I put out there is that we are going for criticality by July 4th, but we're also going for the next step beyond that too, which is power operations. So we're not just going to go critical. We're going to make some heat. We're going to have we have a cooling system. We're going to extract the cooling system. We're going to do heat rejection. So we're going to have first thermal power operations of an advanced reactor, which will be extremely exciting. So criticalities of it's obviously the first step. We actually already went critical back in November, not under the pilot program, just totally separate authorization there in our Nova Corps. And so the goal for Ward 250 is to take the next step beyond that, which is power. So it's super exciting. There's a huge amount of complexity that comes with that that going from cold criticality to power operations that we're learning live. We're doing this on a test site that is not a national lab that kind of also elevates the challenge a little bit and you know started as a bear passenger last September. So there's a whole lot that we're learning live and getting experience on. And that's really why the pilot program is so important is because it opens up that window of opportunity. Right. We get to take these designs. We get to take these components and we've been testing and we get to go all the way from bear dirt to power operations with the DOE working with us along the way. That's a super unique thing. I would argue it's actually what the DOE was really really created for. And a bunch of different things happen between government and industry and markets that have sort of slowed that over time. Right. We went from a very rapid period of testing new types of reactors under the AEC. And then under the DOE it's been more focused on science and individual components on a lot of the software that ends up being really helpful to us, but less on full integrated reactors turning on and making power. So that's what's super important here at Valor. We believe hardware is really the key to to success in this industry. We know that reactors can be saved. We know that they can be cheap people have demonstrated these aspects before we even know they can be build fast. All of these things were true in the 60s and 70s. The problem now is is hardware execution. And so that's really what we focus on over everything else. That's awesome. Isaiah, listen, it's great to spend some time with you. Great to meet you. Brett mentioned my history, ship of power. We were we were early interested in micro reactors and transporting them and and doing things fast and to see you guys's progress has been nothing short of amazing to watch. So great to be here with you. Isaiah, you guys you guys made a lot of headlines recently moving a reactor across the country, at least from California to Utah. I think you called it Operation Windlord. Big shout out to the Valor production team. Just awesome videos that came out of that. What a what a move. Maybe not the first time the US has moved stuff nuclear technology via air before, but probably the first time or at least the first time in a long time where a public private partnership is what kind of executed that and you just mentioned. You know the history of public private partnerships and industry and government and all the changes you know throughout history, but tell us a little bit about that program about about that operation about what went into moving it, you know, obviously that's a difficult thing to execute. You got a military airplane there and all of your componentry going in there. Just tell us tell us about the whole operation and why not moving on trucks. Yeah, that's a viable mode of transportation, but give us give us your color on Operation Windlord. Yeah, Windlord was was amazing and a lot of work behind the scenes that you know, we kind of showed up with with a press release in a bunch of awesome videos and. You know the Secretary of Energy flew with us the governor of Utah met us at Hill Air Force base. It was an incredible day, but what went into it was months and months of work from our team on actually getting the plant to the state that we said it was going to be in right for a long time. We've said it's important that the US military be able to transport nuclear reactors BSC 17 is never happening before it's the first ever C17 air left of a nuclear reactor. And it's one thing to say that because the weights are correct right it technically fits under the useful load of a C17 aircraft. It's one thing to say that it should be able to meet seismic limits because of the fundamentals of how you designed it. It's a different thing to go and do the loading analysis on every single fitting on every single flange on every single connection point to add hardening throughout both the reactor pressure vessel itself and all the insular systems around it. I think one people one thing that people missed on on Windlord I've just seen a few things you know on the internet of people saying like oh it's you know they move the pressure vessel but. You know next time try to move the entire plant and I have to chuckle a little bit because we did we move the entire plant the whole reactor not just the pressure vessel we move the pressure vessel we move the core we move the heat transport system we move the helium services system we move to the reactor control and we moved both halves of the control room literally the entire plant blue on three different C17s exactly as they are now sitting in our test setting you saw so it's been a long process of trying to figure out how can we save weight and make sure that's hard and precise making the seismic loads of the C17 experiences in flight or could experience in accelerated flight or acceleration or a hard landing. Our lot actually we had to design some of these things for six G's and some directions and you know over over certain time periods so yeah it was it was a huge engineering effort we're really really grateful to the Department of War or stepping forward and being able to move at pace with us this is something that again that they've wanted for a long time they know that it's a useful capability and important capability to be able to deploy system like this by aircraft and you know it's a great thing to do. It's a huge step in the right direction. I just for clarification for you know the sake of our listeners I think you said the only thing that you didn't transport via the C17s was the shielding and perhaps one other the fuel right. Yeah, we flew it unfilled yeah that's right so we feel it on unfilled in fact the core load was removed from the RPV so the the graphite did fly but it flew unpacked from the vessel and there was no fuel in the graphite and then we also did not take the shielding. I think this is generally true of any micro reactor I know there's there are people out there who are designing micro reactors and they want them eventually to be able to fly BSC 17. I think the shielding will just never be a part of that equation it just basically doesn't make sense and what you do instead is that you can build shielding on site you can bring molds with you we actually have molds which fit on a C17 we didn't fly those on this mission but our molds actually can go back in the C17 you can cast on site or you can do with the US Army has been kind of planted the honestly since the first time. 50s, which is to build berms and to do earth work around it. They have these, if you've seen, geostabilizing bags that you can fill with different types of water and rocks, and you can do analysis on the site that you're on to figure out the best mix of material is to get the attenuation that you need with the least activation. This is one of those things that would just say is kind of site-specific. Some sites, you want certain attenuation. Some sites you want less, and you just go for a wider exclusion zone. It really just varies on your deployment scenario. But the really important thing is can you actually get the plants itself on a site and get it ready for power? Never's made sense moving concrete by C-17, right? Yeah, not a good way to. Yeah, not a good use of aircraft. Concrete and aircraft just still makes, yeah. Never a good plan. So I think we started a little bit down this kind of line of discussion, but maybe you could help us a little bit because you alluded to that the where this reactor is eventually ending up in Utah was just a dirt patch a few months ago, maybe a year ago, longer. I don't want to mischaracterize things. Yes, September. September is when we broke ground, yeah. And so, why Utah? We saw you mentioned the governor's interest, attendance at Hill Air Force Base during the airlift. So there's clearly legs and support in the state for you all. But what exactly brought you there and what does the future hold for Valor in Utah? Yeah, we have been so grateful for the partnership of the state of Utah for Governor Cox for the legislature for the Energy Department. It's an incredible state to build in for many different types of industry, even software. There's a growing software ecosystem there. But what we saw was that the state was willing to lead on nuclear and they wanted to move quickly in R&D to do that. So a lot of states want to be part of the future of nuclear. They will even create funding packages to say, hey, we will actually attract developers to our state through funding. And I think the really smart states understand that what we actually need today for the next, let's say, 18 months to two years is we need space to do R&D and we need a smart state government who can support that. So a good example of this is you begin construction on a site and you start to need state permits, right? Any construction sites need state permits of various types. And is the state going to be a partner and trying to figure out how to get those things done quickly, how to get them done safely, how to bring resources to bear to accomplish that, or is it going to be sort of the normal pace of bureaucracy that people can get lost in? And what we found over and over from the state of Utah is that they want this, that the people there want this. It's an energy state, right? Utah's an energy state. It's the county that we're in. There's two counties that are Emory County and Carving County. It used to be all one big county called Carving County. It's called Carving County because it's a cold country, right? There used to be 33 coal mines up in the mountains there. And there's multiple gigawatt scale plants. A bunch of power plant is three miles from our test site. And the community understands the value of energy. They know how important it is. They have people who are skilled and trained to work in large scale plants. They can do civil infrastructure work. Our site is on a road called Cole Hall Road, which is great because it actually means that the road is a very, very high-tension asphalt that actually allows us to be able to move heavy equipment in. That sort of thing. It's a really natural fit. We're really enjoying getting to know that people of Utah and our community has been phenomenal in accepting this project and helping us move fast. That's awesome. It's important for any nuclear project to find a good home. Sounds like you've found one there. I had a little bit of run-in with Utah. Man, what a place. They're thinking over the horizon, which is pretty cool. Isaiah, Brett and I jumped right into you. You're company, your hardware, your operation, but we didn't ask you about yourself. Want to hear a little bit about your background. Maybe lead the question a little bit. I've been tracking the last few years. A lot of ex software guys, Silicon Valley guys, Southern California, kind of coming into hard tech. How did you find this? How did you find? I stumbled into nuclear. I will confess. Brett got into it much younger than I, but tell us your journey. How'd you get into this? Yeah. I'm actually not a Southern California guy. I live here in LA now. We're in our Hawthorne factory as we speak. I actually moved here in order to start the company. I travel all around the United States trying to find the best place to start a nuclear energy company. I interviewed founders in Seattle in Austin and Boston, San Francisco. I really travel all around trying to figure out where's the best place to start a company like this. The thing that I found over and over again is that South Bay Los Angeles, specifically this area, has the highest concentration of incredibly talented heart tech engineers anywhere in the United States. It's really incomparable. The amount of people here who know how to produce hardware at scale that experiences thermal cycles, people understand all the different grades and types of metals and how to cut them and how to manufacture them and how to do it quickly. There's people who understand instrumentation and control. You have chemistry here in the combustion sciences. You have incredible structures, people. All of these different disciplines that come together in order to build a nuclear reactor is just an enormous amount of talent here in South Bay Los Angeles. That's why we moved here. My personal background, I'm actually from the Midwest, grew up around Illinois, Kentucky, about five years in Kentucky. This has been in the back of my head for a long time. I wanted to start this company since I was about 16, 17. I realized that nuclear was in a rut. It was in a couple of different ruts. One, here's a context on nuclear as I see it and really why I start the company. Nuclear is really cheap and really fast except if you're in this one small eddy. That one small eddy is in the west in the last 30 years. That's the only place where nuclear is not cheap and fast. Anywhere outside of that, if you look outside of the last 30 years in the US, it's cheap and fast. If you look inside the last 30 years but outside of the US, it's cheap and fast. Or you could extend it to say the west right? You're up in the United States. It's actually an exception to have nuclear be this highly expensive, highly bespoke thing that takes forever and overruns at cost. The norm of nuclear is that it is low cost, fast, cheap and safe. We have to get back to that. How do we get back to that? Well, I think that the way that we have to get back to that is to do it in an American way. We're trying to build reactors in a way that we actually are not really good at building anymore. We're not very good at civil infrastructure anymore. Nuclear reactors have always been civil infrastructure projects. If you look back to the time in the United States was really, really successfully building large scale, gigawatt scale reactors, we were also good at building other large scale concrete projects. We were also good at building bridges. We were good at building highways. We were good at building dams. We have this muscle of how to do large scale civil infrastructure that we don't have anymore. If you're going to do nuclear, you need to not try to use the same tool set and the same way of doing things that we used to when we were much better at that. What you need to do is how do we build things today? When we build extremely successful industries today, they look different. They look more like manufacturing. They look like the Falcon 9. They look like Starship. They look like Tesla. These different methods they move toward smaller form factors, higher rate of production, more autonomy. That's what a nuclear reactor really should look like today in the United States. It's not true for every country. Korea and China still have the ability to do these large scale infrastructure projects very successfully and they're able to do that at cost. Hearing the United States, the way that we win is more through manufacturing than through civil infrastructure. That's really the focus of the company and it's what I've been working on for the last decade. I totally dig it Isaiah. I think some of the guys at MIT had published this extensively. It's like if you trend a civil construction efficiency over time, it's gone down in the West, undeniable. If you look at manufacturing facility efficiency, output based on man hours applied, it's gone up inversely. The model man it resonates with me for sure. You talked about the talent that you're able to find there in Southern California. Tell us more about the team at Valor. I guess maybe two things I'm interested in. How much traditional nuclear experience is on the team? The second thing is you guys had a phenomenal fundraising round just recently. It had some really interesting public folks join that round. I'm speaking specifically about Sham Sankar from Palantir, Palmer Lucky, and Aroll. What's about your backers and about the talent of the team? I think we've got a pretty good mix here at Valor of traditional nuclear folks. Well, actually, I'm going to back that up. We don't have traditional nuclear folks, right? Because in the last 30 years, traditional nuclear means. not building anything and being years over budget and being widely over budget on spend, right? So we don't have that. What we do have is people who have been working extremely hard toward this vision of nuclear energy, which is low cost, which is fast for a very long time and have been waiting for the right catalyst moment and the right team and the right opportunity to apply those skills. So that's one portion of our team is you know people who have been around the block who have seen all the ways that projects can go wrong and the project can take too long and they've figured out how to avoid them. And then we just have a lot of interdisciplinary engineers who have been in many different places, who have built rockets, who have built cars, who have built ships, right? And they've seen large scale fast pace construction and manufacturing together in many, many different arenas. And you have to bring these two groups of people together, right? You have to have people who have been part of fast pace hardware programs, who have actually seen the importance of a test stand. There's a good example of this right behind me here in the background. That's our control rod drive unit test stand right there. So it's got a spousal staircase to steal frame stand is a tube. And we've got heat tracinate tube and we can actually bring that up. There's actually two of them right there. We can run them in parallel. We can bring those up to full nuclear temperatures and pressures in helium. And what that allows us to do is we can put a control rod drive unit with a chain and an actual control rod. And we can run that up and down a thousand times. It's running right now. We've got a control rod drive running in there right now. And this is the type of thing that's like a mindset and a skill set of people who come from existing hardware development programs where they know that, listen, if you want the rocket to fly, you're going to have to have tested the turbo pump like 50 different times. And it's going to have to have some duty cycles on it, right? And you combine that with the mindset of the nuclear folks, you know, we're going to have to do extremely precise analysis on the motor because that motor is going to be experiencing flux and we want to make sure that the flux is not going to overly affect the motor and you have to take these two mindsets and meld them together in order to create the pace that valor has today, which I think is extremely impressive, but I'm very proud of it. I say, you alluded already to a, you know, this manufacturing sort of more focused mindset. And, you know, of course there's a whole world of folks that begin to believe they know all the answers around the nuclear deployment paradigms and the future of what things go on and criticize and say perhaps more established technologies and pedigrees are the better approach and perhaps things like you and others are engaged in our ways of time. You know, can you, can you talk to us a little bit about why the technology choices or the deployment and development of choices you are making or that you have made sort of support or play into why you think, you know, the paradigm is shifting and the opportunity basis shifting for deploying nuclear technology the way you'd like to. Yeah, so okay, I'll say a couple of things here. One is we have to all of us have to come at this with a certain amount of humility, right? None of us actually know the future. We're all trying to do this different ways. We all want energy very cheap. We all think that nuclear is a great stable, safe, clean way to make energy. But we all have to back up and say we're making an attempt at it, right? And, and valor is very much in our camp. We're making an attempt at this. And we have very good reasons why we think our time he's going to win. I think some of our strongest critics frankly just need to analyze themselves a little bit and realize that maybe valor is wrong about our approach. But the only thing we really know about the existing approach is that it's definitely wrong. Right. It has tried. Right. Like we have tried to do these large skills. Similar to simple infrastructure projects and they have not worked. Now you're also free to keep trying because you believe that it just needs more capital or we just need to do it a couple more times or you know all these different approaches and you know I'm okay with that. You won't see me, you know, lambasting companies that think that that's the right approach. But you need to have a certain dose of humility to say you know maybe there actually isn't better way to do this. Because we have to we haven't tried that approach and it hasn't worked. So that's that's the first thing that I'll say now. I think if you look at this from another perspective, let's zoom out and say 20 years from now. Imagine in your mind that valor. Tomics has worked. Right. It's a multi trillion dollar company. It's making most of the world's energy. Energy costs less than a cent per kilowatt hour. And you know we help. We all have very, very cheap industrial materials and steel and a limit of again here in the United States. And the data centers are doing whatever data centers will be doing in 20 years. Okay. So imagine this vision in your head and look backwards and think what could have predicted that outcome. And I think that's an interesting frame here. Look back to the companies where they are today. What are they doing today? What type of activities are they engaging in today? What's their progress? What's their pace and see if you can draw that line. And I would argue that that line is drawn through hardware progress. That line is drawn through the ability to actually split atoms to actually produce reactors and turn them on to do that quickly to do it with a small amount of capital to do it with an extremely focused team. And to make the type of architecture decisions that will allow you to go from one iteration to the next with enough speed that you can actually learn. Right. If you're not moving fast, you actually can't learn. This is a really, really vital thing that I think people miss. Paces actually what allows you to get better over time because if you go five years or you know seven years eight years from founding a company to splitting it out of for the first time. Many people along that journey, which learned things along that path have moved on. Right. People move on from companies. They've gone to other things in the knowledge leaves with them. You actually have to have the pace of execution in the company where the same team is learning these lessons and getting better and better over time. Valorous a company today is much, much wiser than we were six months ago. In six months for now, we'll be wiser than we are today. And that's because we have learning going on through construction through testing through actual vision and as it stands today, Valorous the only startup in all of human history to have ever gone critical. And that's only the first step, right. You can't make money just with a chain of vision reaction. You got to do a lot more than that. But I think it says something. So I would argue that you know if you're trying to predict this over time, you should look at things like that. You should look at pace. You should look at time to criticality. You should look at time from first criticality to second criticality. These are the types of things that will predict the company, which is actually going to push through all the hard problems and win in the future. I say I really appreciate that answer and I'm sorry I have to ask one little follow up here because I've heard you know this framing around you know where the first startup to go critical. And of course you know there's there's many other folks in this space who have done you know and say other different things. I know Kairos and others you know have did you know experiments at the similar sort of facility that you were looking at for your sort of first criticality venture. Can you just sort of maybe help us understand sort of the the differences that you all see as to why you you kind of say you know our experiment or hour sort of endeavor towards criticality was different than others and every just just help us understand. Because I do think there's been a bit of criticism out there and I think you would agree that some people don't sort of understand kind of what you're trying to say here when you say this sometimes. Yeah sure I mean it's pretty simple. Valor is the only startup in history that has ever built a nuclear core put fuel in it and achieved a sustained vision reaction just very straightforwardly. No startup has ever done that other than us. So yeah it's it's like I've heard people say that criticism and they don't have a counter example no one else is done that Kairos did not build the core. I think this by the way those guys were doing awesome work and funny enough no one from Kairos came to me and said hey we already did that is other people saying like wait didn't think you something with uncertainty yeah they they contributed on some research with NSERC but NSERC built a tracer core took a critical Kairos contributed on some research. Valor is the only startup in history that has ever built a nuclear core put fuel in it and achieved a sustained vision reaction. Other people have produced fuel that contributed fuel to cores that's another example I think people have brought up and again like I think the important part here is like even though that was very important. It's also extremely simple right and lots of people have done critical piles over the last 50 years less 70 years start with Chicago pile one the core that we took critical to know the core was actually not that different from the pile that Enrico Fermi. You know to critical back in 1942 and so you know when we talk about no but it's not like we're saying we've done this incredible thing it's actually the opposite which is. We've done the very basics right we've done the elementary step that every other startup should have done a decade ago right if you are in if you are a nuclear startup and you have not done a critical pile yet it's like what are you waiting for. You have to be in the hardware now people argue well there's no point in doing a critical pile we already have benchmarks we already you understand these things well and I would say yeah but we've actually learned a lot from Nova like we actually learned a lot about the shadowing effects of our control rod drive assemblies because the way that we built that core is that we built it as essentially a single slice of our core. So that the existing word 250 of course you graphite core, it's tracer compact fuels. We have helium cooling channels. We have boron absorbers in the outer ring. This boron of neutron absorbers help control the flux because we have a halo in that tracer core. And we have, you know, excess creativity. So we moderate that down with absorbers. And then we have boron control rods and in a certain configuration of those elements. And we basically took one of those center hexagonal channels. So one set of control rod. And then we took the exact same catch of the fuel and the exact same absorber configuration. And then we took that configuration critical with extra reflector around it. So this is basically what Nova was. You can see the photos. It's pretty cool. We learned a ton from that, right? We were not exactly sure because there actually aren't benchmarks which show this. There aren't benchmarks which show us the shadowing effects of boron absorbers in a graphite reflector with, you know, cross shadow effects of a control rod, right? There's like ways that you can model that. And we did model it with the RMP and we did our, you know, wanna carlo in a bunch of different ways. And we had a pretty good answer. But then you go gather the actual data. And we had foils inside of that core that got activated and went to account lab. And we can actually count them and say, okay, this was the exact flux right in that region. That actually taught us a lot. And actually taught us that we had more, our control rods actually had higher worth than we expected. So that's a very important data point that's gonna go into the criticality of our core in work 250. The other really important thing though is that it actually taught us as a company, as an organization, how to go critical, which is not trivial, right? Like even though it is the basics, it's also not trivial. We had to, we had a quality control program, right? We actually built that core right here in this room. In fact, this little thing that you can see right here, that's our clean lab that we actually assembled the core in for the first time. It did the stack up into the fitting and made sure that our tolerances were correct. We cut it on the machines right back there. So even though these like, they are like the basics and they're very simple. The fact that Valerie's the first star of been history to do that, I think it's actually just something that the nuclear industry should have some self-reflection on and say, man, we should be more in the physical world, right? We should not be just analysis companies, not just licensing companies. Like it's time to go split some atoms, right? So I hope what Nova did is like motivated the rest of the nuclear industry to say, let's be an atoms splitting industry, not just a design industry or analysis industry. - I really appreciate the spirit and your answer there. Thank you so much, Isaiah. But now unfortunately, gotta ask you about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And I know this may be a delicate topic that you might have to avoid direct commentary around. But I'd like to ask you a question related to the NRC and the federal government in the broader sense. It's very clear that the federal government has made substantial changes related to regulatory or bureaucratic burden around the deployment of nuclear technologies in the United States in the last 12 months, both at the NRC and the DOE, things that I wouldn't have been relieved are possible years ago and everything. And then things that staff at both the DOE and NRC are hugely encouraged to be in engaging in at this point. And some of that may or may not address concerns you and others had about the appropriate role of the federal government in deployment or of these technologies. Do you see the landscape changing at all or opening up to accommodate the type of future energy deployments, you and others are aiming to achieve that might have driven things like the lawsuit to begin with and everything. How do you see things now? - Yeah, happy to comment on this. There's obviously things about the lawsuit. I can't comment on particularly, but I can absolutely talk about the NRC in general and what we think is gonna happen going forward. And first of all, by the way, you're absolutely right that the NRC has changed enormously over the last 12 months. So I think there's been lots of justified criticism of the NRC, some of which has been my own criticism. And the biggest thing right now is we have to actually wait and see whether or not all that criticism remains true given the changes of the last year. Part 57, which came out a week and a half ago, is probably one of my favorite documents in the world today. It is such a breath of fresh air. It gives me an enormous hope. It's probably the most hopeful I've ever been for the future of nuclear energy in the United States. Now implementation matters more than regulation, right? So to be seen whether the implementation will be as good as it could be, I'm extremely hopeful about that though. And I actually have a great deal of confidence. So it will be. The lawsuit is a little bit of a different thing. What the lawsuit was about is whether or not there is a class or a category of reactors, which is beneath the concern of the federal government. And this is something that Congress has been super clear on. In the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, Congress is very clear that there is a class of reactors, which is below federal concern, because it's too safe and too, basically that amount to fuel involved and the hazard is lower than federal concern, right? So there's this category. Now Congress does not define what establishes that threshold. They say there is a category when the AC at the time, right? When the AC initially reviewed this statute bread and legislative review before it was actually passed, the commission was extremely supportive of this. They said, you know what, this is great because there are, there's a whole host of activities that would allow the nuclear industry to move forward in small scale experiments and testing invalidation that would not cause us to be a bottleneck on that activity. And honestly, we have bigger things to worry about because we're in the business of, you know, regulating massive gigawatt scale plants. And there are, you know, real levels of hazard around that. And so this is great. And unfortunately after the statute was passed, the AC action never followed up on this. And really what they needed to do was take the rule of what a utilization facility is and say, okay, what do we exactly mean by that? As Congress says, there's this version of utilization facility or sorry of a vision reaction of a reactor that is not actually a utilization facility as defined by the NRC because it's too small and too safe. And unfortunately, it just never happened. It just sort of, you know, fizzled out in the history of rulemaking. And so the lawsuit just seeks to rectify that. And the reason is it's very important in any industry that you always have a vibrant core of physical world testing. Right? In the nuclear industry, we do a lot of analysis. We go a lot of simulation. I have the chance to visit, you know, some of the people in our national labs who are actually working on MCP and working on all of the different codes that we use to do analysis. But I think it's really interesting that at the end of the day, they all need benchmarks. Right? And so we're the actual thing that we get to use to go and make sure that the codes that we built are correct. And frankly, the NRC has just been too slow to actually allow these physical world experiments to happen. And again, this is kind of inevitable and kind of obvious. Right? The NRC has much, much bigger problems to deal with than a small critical assembly, right? They need to make sure that the state of New York is safe. Right? They need to make sure that the gigawatt scale reactors are being maintained correctly. So there's a separation of concerns here that I think Congress rightly flagged back in 1954 that was never rectified. So that's really what the lawsuit is about. Isaiah, this has been great to meet you. And here's this story. I kind of think of you're like, I think of the Teddy Roosevelt speech. You're the man in the arena, man. You're not gonna be, nobody in the Veriton team is gonna throw me stones your way. You're out there doing it. I mean, shooting neutrons around and your Novakore experience and that's great. And transporting things on C-17s, like I think Veriton has a unique audience that's comprised of folks who think a lot about broader energy strategy, whether that's oil and gas companies, transmission companies, power companies, and the like. I think this is probably where we're into it today, but just tell us, what did we miss? Knowing that's our audience is folks who are broadly interested in energy. What kind of closing remarks do you want to point towards that audience? - Yeah, I think the biggest thing to take away, when you hear Valor's name in the news or see headlines, what should you think about? What should you imagine us doing? And really it comes down to hardware execution. There's a lot of different things that a company could focus on. You can focus on a customer pipeline. You could focus on marketing. You can focus on gaining interest for the way that you wanted to deploy your product. And our view on the world is that the world needs a lot of energy, that nuclear is the cheapest, cleanest, most scalable way and the safest way to make energy. And so the real task in front of us is to execute through hardware. It's to make sure that we can manufacture them, make sure that they run the way that we expect them to, that we can maintain them, that we have the capability to ramp scale and production of those reactors. And we really believe that that is the thing that ultimately will bring the United States the energy dependence that it needs in the future. clear. So that's really the soul of the company. There's a lot of other things that go into making a company successful. But really the most important is can we actually build these reactors? Are they safe? Are they low cost? Can we deploy them quickly? And that's what we are over everything else focused on doing. So really appreciate you having me on. Isaiah, we really, really thoroughly appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. Join us for this conversation. Appreciate your willingness always to just jump right into it and tackle it head on. Really appreciate it. Isaiah Taylor, CEO and founder at Valoratomics. Thank you so much again for joining us today.