--- title: How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar... description: Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor discusses how his startup built and turned on the first advanced nuclear reactor by a private company outside a national... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/how-nuclear-will-unlock-energy-abundance-with-valar-atomics-founder-isaiah-taylor-vetlj5x9m twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor | daily.dev og:description: Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor discusses how his startup built and turned on the first advanced nuclear reactor by a private company outside a national... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/how-nuclear-will-unlock-energy-abundance-with-valar-atomics-founder-isaiah-taylor-vetlj5x9m og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/VETlJ5x9M.png og:image:alt: How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor **[No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups](https://daily.dev/sources/nopriorspodcast)** · 61 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor discusses how his startup built and turned on the first advanced nuclear reactor by a private company outside a national lab, powering it under a Department of Energy testing pathway rather than the slower NRC commercial route. The conversation covers why nuclear stalled after Three Mile Island, Valar's philosophy of treating reactor building as a hardware iteration and manufacturing problem rather than a design problem, its passive safety approach that eliminates need for active cooling, verticalizing supply chains (concrete, control systems) to cut costs and time, and its recent demonstration powering an Nvidia Blackwell chip directly from the reactor to host a website. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did the United States stop building new nuclear reactors after the 1970s? The primary cause was the Three Mile Island incident, where a cooling system failure caused a core meltdown, though no one died or suffered radiation exposure. The public reaction and mishandled optics turned sentiment against nuclear power, and once the industry stopped, the country also lost its large-scale civil infrastructure building capability needed to restart it. _Track how nuclear power policy and infrastructure debates evolve by following energy stories on daily.dev._ ### How does a nuclear reactor stay safe after shutdown without active cooling systems? A passive design can rely on physics rather than powered cooling: after a scram, decay heat (about 5-6% of prior power output) is removed through passive circulation, where water in cooling jackets boils, the steam condenses, and natural circulation with no moving parts and no electrical input carries heat away over roughly two days, eliminating meltdown risk even if all safety systems and power fail. _Engineers evaluating reactor safety designs can follow hardware and infrastructure breakthroughs on daily.dev._ ### What regulatory pathway did Valar Atomics use to turn on its first nuclear reactor outside the NRC commercial process? Valar used Department of Energy testing authority, originally intended by Congress when the Atomic Energy Commission split into the NRC (commercial deployment) and ERDA, later renamed the DOE (testing). This little-used testing pathway let Valar go critical without a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar NRC commercial permitting process, under executive order EO14301 calling for advanced reactors on American soil. _Founders navigating regulatory pathways for hardware startups can track policy shifts like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Nuclear startup Valar Atomics in talks to raise new funding at $6B valuation](https://daily.dev/posts/nuclear-startup-valar-atomics-in-talks-to-raise-new-funding-at-6b-valuation-y9dxewcdq) · TechCrunch · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire leads $1B round for nuclear startup Valar Atomics](https://daily.dev/posts/sequoia-s-shaun-maguire-leads-1b-round-for-nuclear-startup-valar-atomics-eeve0lgov) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#startup](https://daily.dev/tags/startup), [#hardware](https://daily.dev/tags/hardware), [#nvidia](https://daily.dev/tags/nvidia) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/how-nuclear-will-unlock-energy-abundance-with-valar-atomics-founder-isaiah-taylor-vetlj5x9m) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder 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