Nuclear energy is either a dirty phrase or a holy grail, depending on whom you ask. For the energy startup Valar Atomics and its founder, Isaiah Taylor, it’s the latter. Valar announced in March, one month after raising a $19 million seed round, that it was partnering with the Philippines’ Nuclear Research Institute to develop nuclear energy for the Pacific nation. Then, in April, Valar joined multiple states and reactor companies in a lawsuit against America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission, alleging that the agency’s rules are too onerous to allow for small-scale testing and innovation. In May, following President Donald Trump’s executive order to reform nuclear-reactor testing, Taylor announced that Valar will partner with the state of Utah to build a pilot advanced reactor at the San Rafael Energy Research Center by Independence Day next year.

The American Conservative caught up with 26-year-old Taylor in a phone interview to hear about Valar’s whirlwind past few months.

What is the elevator pitch for Valar Atomics?

Valar Atomics is focused on making the world’s energy with nuclear power. We do that by making a small modular reactor. It's a very safe, very simple reactor design, and we essentially make a small version of it, and then we make many of them…. We do this in something we call a gigasite. A gigasite is essentially a large-scale site where we create hundreds of the same reactor over and over. That allows us to achieve economies of scale and get our reactors very cheap. Then we create tons of power, and we use that power for data centers and heavy industry and metal refining and all the sorts of things that are going to help reindustrialize.

I know that Valar just inked this deal with the Philippines’ research institute. What's going on there? What’s the upshot? 

The Philippines is a really key ally of the United States. They're counter-positioned against China, and are becoming extremely critical to our defense posture in that region. They have a big power issue. They don't have enough local energy resources. Their natural gas is running out, their oil’s running out. They don’t have solar, they don’t have wind, and they really, really need nuclear.

So a couple years ago they reached out to the United States and said, “Hey, we’d really like to be able to make nuclear reactors here from U.S. companies.” And it looks like Valar Atomics is gearing up to build the first one with this agreement that we signed.

Are you guys working on a demonstrator reactor right now? What's your timeline or your hope for getting something from demonstration to powering these industrial sites? 

There are a couple levels of demonstration. We've just completed what’s called Ward Zero. Ward Zero is a non-nuclear prototype reactor. So, essentially, we build a nuclear reactor. But instead of putting nuclear fuel in it, we put heaters in it…. And we use those heaters to mimic the nuclear fuel, and it allows us to test the thermal properties of the reactor, test all the mechanical systems and make sure everything's working well.

Then we move to the actual nuclear reactor in the Philippines, that’s called Ward One. Ward One is named after Ward Schaap, my great-grandfather who was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. Then we go from Ward One, which is a very small demonstrator reactor, to our full commercial model, which we'll make right after that. So there’s essentially a series of prototypes that allow us to demonstrate capability and increase our capability leading up to these full-scale sites. 

You guys are probably glad to be working with an ally of the U.S. But what's it been like working with the U.S. regulatory state? Is that something you've approached yet? 

The short answer is that the nuclear environment in the U.S. died in 1979. 1979 was Three Mile Island. This was a nuclear incident that had no deaths and had no measurable effect on the environment or health of the public around the plant, and yet it completely shuttered the nuclear industry in the U.S. Unfortunately, a lot of that was absorbed into the regulator. So the regulator added extremely stringent rules. We added a lot of requirements that make it take forever and cost a ton of money to go through simple reactor prototypes.

Our conviction is that you need to go through reactor prototypes in order to develop a technology… I think we have a real window here where we could fix that environment.

Can you imagine Valar under a second Democratic administration? Were you white-knuckling it through the election? Was that on your mind? 

Yeah, we were absolutely white-knuckling it through the election, no doubt. During [the] Biden era, we were working with the State Department and with some other people and [were] able to work with the bureaucracy that was there, but the perspective of actually being able to bring it back to the United States was just completely off the radar.

To Biden’s credit, he did start to push for nuclear in the last couple years of his administration. He did sign the ADVANCE Act [a bill intended to accelerate nuclear technological progress], which was a bipartisan act in Congress, but I'd class all these things as sort of trying to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, right? There needs to be a complete overhaul of the regulatory environment in the United States in order for nuclear to work. That was just not something that the prior administration had the stomach for. So we're really grateful to be working with the Trump administration.

This whole concept of the politicization of energy—it’s been going on for decades. I saw the headline recently that the EPA Museum left the first Trump admin out. Anything having to do with the environment or regulations, it’s just become so political. Some things are just so clearly products of the left, and some things are so clearly products of the right. Can you just talk about why you think energy should be post-political?

The most obvious thing that you should do for your country is to make energy cheaper. If the two political parties are essentially two different theses on how to best serve the nation, then both sides should be able to agree that we should have more energy and it should be cheaper, because that affects absolutely everything about American life.

But unfortunately, that’s not been the case. Instead, the focus on the left has been not how to make cheaper energy and more abundant energy, but how to offset carbon emissions. But the ironic thing is that if you look at the climate impact of the United States versus a country like China or any of our geopolitical rivals, our impact on the environment is already so much lower. We’re just chasing diminishing marginal returns while making everything more expensive for ourselves and making it impossible to build anything. 

I think that there was a lot of irrationality in that policy for a long time. On the left, there was this religiosity of greenwashing everything and trying to promote these policies that make it impossible to build. I think that probably a lot of that was actually, if you trace the money all the way back, you’ll find that some of these funds came from places that actually don’t want us to succeed.

That's sometimes the only way to explain the total irrationality. It shouldn’t have to take two-and-a-half, three years to do an environmental assessment to build something. You should be able to do an environmental assessment in months, not years. That’s how it is everywhere else in the world where you’re actually able to build stuff. So this shouldn’t be political. It’s only political to the extent that the left doesn’t want to build things anymore. And I think that’s a mistake. 

On your Valar journey, have you had any strange bedfellows? Maybe people who are from the green energy world or left the green energy world who've told you, “Hey, we're interested in what you're doing?”

Absolutely. The whole nuclear space is a very interesting mix of the freedom-loving, patriotic right and the wanting-to-move-away-from-carbon left. You have people from both sides, and I think we can all come together on that, because nuclear is the cheapest energy and it does happen to be carbon-neutral. So there are people who just know that energy should be 10 times cheaper and nuclear is the only way to get there. And there are people who want energy without carbon, and nuclear is also the way to get there.

When people hear about your gigasites, do they ever compare you to Henry Ford and the Model T? What do you think is a good historical analogue for what Valar's trying to do?

I would say that Model T is an interesting comparison, but SpaceX might be a little bit better. SpaceX took sort of a quasi-governmental industry, rockets, even though they were made by ULA, which was technically a private company. They were defense contractors who sort of make things on the government dime for the government’s purposes. Elon took that, and he essentially privatized rocketry, and he was able to streamline it and manufacture it and make rockets land themselves. Valar’s trying to do a very similar thing for nuclear. The nuclear industry has been, somewhat, a public-private partnership over the last 50 years, which I think has driven a lot of irrationality into it, unfortunately. And we are a fully privatized company that's looking to design, produce, manufacture, and operate its own reactors, and I think that’s gonna drive costs down an enormous amount. 

You talked about Three Mile Island. When people hear nuclear, they think about accidents. They bring up Chernobyl; they bring up Fukushima. So how do you think about safety and accident prevention and all of those kinds of things? What kind of conversations have you been having with your team?

The three major nuclear incidents that have happened so far have all pertained to what’s called water reactors. So water reactors use water in the core for a combination of cooling and moderation. Chernobyl used graphite and water. Three Mile Island and Fukushima were just water. These were both large-scale, high–power density designs that are very, very efficient. They sort of came from the U.S. Navy’s form of building reactors. All of commercial nuclear today is downstream of reactors that went into the submarines in the U.S. Navy. Water reactors are really important for naval vessels because they're very power dense. What that means is they’re small and they make a ton of power. But being very small and making a lot of power is also sort of naturally unsafe. So if you have a ton of energy in a very small diameter, or let’s say an enormous amount of energy in a big diameter, you are sort of working against physics, or physics is working against you, in terms of safety.

We do the exact opposite. We operate a very, very low-power density within an architecture that doesn’t use water at all. What that means is that we don’t have any massive pressure spikes in the system because there’s no steam generation and there’s no decomposition of water into hydrogen. A lot of the nuclear accidents in the past have had to do with hydrogen explosions from water overheating. We basically just avoid those problems altogether. Our reactors are passively safe designs operated in extremely low-power density, so that if anything does go wrong, the heat that’s produced by the core does not have to be actively removed. We don’t rely on human operators or active engineering systems to remove heat from the system. It's just passively removed based on principles of physics. So, there are ways that you can design around these problems, and we have, and I would say one of the reasons that this hasn’t been pursued in the past is just that it's been hard to test and iterate in nuclear. We just sort of had a design that was decided on in the ’60s, and we haven’t really been able to innovate too much since then. So Valar is really stepping out and being able to do that. 

You're part of a very innovative crowd of tech-minded entrepreneurs known as the “Gundo bros.” How are you guys spurring each other on even while working on totally different technologies? Can you talk a little bit about that environment and say what somebody who’s never heard of El Segundo should know?

El Segundo is the best place in America to build things today. It’s a small suburb of Los Angeles, but it really feels like its own place. It’s gated on four sides. So on one side we have the beautiful Pacific Ocean. On another side we have the Chevron El Segundo Refinery. Then we have the 405 highway. And then, on the fourth side, we have the Los Angeles International Airport. So it’s a bit of a walled garden of a building. What we have there is really just a bunch of extremely motivated entrepreneurs who love America and love building real things in the physical world. We want to build planes and cars and trains and nuclear reactors. We want to modify the weather and make it do what we want and take dominion of the earth and defend America from her enemies. It’s a really cracked group of people who are extremely motivated and we encourage each other, we support each other all the time.

You talked about taking dominion of the earth. I always want to ask people about their underlying philosophy. And I think I can guess a little bit, but it'd be better to get it in your own words. What affects your philosophy? Is it your faith? Is it being a parent? Is it all of the above? 

My philosophy of technology is basically this: So God created a good and abundant world, that’s number one, right? Men fell and they created pain, toil, etc. Christ came back and redeemed man. Now we’re in this slow period of lifting the curse, right?

I’m a post-millennial, I believe that the world actually gets better and better until Christ returns and death is slowly pushed back and the fall is slowly pushed back. The final enemy to be defeated will be death, and that's when Jesus returns. But until then, we’re slowly lifting the effects of the curse, and you could see that starting in 0 AD. The effects of the curse have slowly been lifted from the world. 

Technology has a ton to do with that. A lot of the lift is actually technological, and that makes it a lot of fun to build because really what we’re doing is we’re sort of anti-cursing the world through technology. We’re making it easier to live on Earth. We’re making it better to live on Earth. That touches a lot of things you wouldn’t necessarily expect. It doesn’t just mean making goods cheaper. It might mean making nature protected, or it might mean making an area more fruitful with water. It might mean changing how we get a certain type of energy because it has a better effect on the environment. So it’s a very exciting place to be building. That’s what drives me every day. 

You came of age slightly after the Great Recession, when everything felt flat and nothing felt exciting. It sounds like you want to leave your kids a very different world. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? 

America was sort of stagnating everywhere except Silicon Valley for the last 20, 30, maybe even 40 years, essentially since the 1970s. We, through trade policy and through environmental policy, essentially made it impossible to build things in the real world, and especially—I think this is what people miss—it’s not that it was impossible for large companies to build things in America, but it was very much impossible for young people with a little bit of capital and a lot of passion to get started and build something. If you have to fill out an Environmental Impact Statement for two years just to do a small project, you don’t do it. 

Instead, kids learn to program computers and they move to Silicon Valley, or they just sort of do their run-of-the-mill, 9-to-5 desk job. But America has always been a nation of innovators. The entire world around us was invented by Americans for the most part. That sounds like an exaggeration. It’s really not. 

Think about the things that make up the modern world. We have cars. Cars were invented by Americans. We have airplanes—invented by Americans. We have iPhones invented by Americans, using the Internet invented by Americans. So almost everything in the modern world you’ll trace back to the innovation of America. Unfortunately, we just completely deleted that over the last 40 years. The way that we did it is through making it hard for young, motivated people to build things at a small scale and then scale them up. And so that’s what I’m excited about that we’re unlocking right now. I think that this administration is a big part of it, but there’s a groundswell that’s sort of inevitable anyway. I think the groundswell is coming from the fact that my generation is fed up. We’re looking into the past, and we’re seeing that we used to build great things and, and we're saying, “Hey, we’re gonna do that again.”

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People are so mean to Gen Z! I think Gen Z’s pretty cool.

I totally agree. I’m very, very bullish on Gen Z actually. I think that we’re going to fix the state of affairs… all by ourselves if we have to.