18 korrents from this recording
Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.
0:01:44 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsNuclear's never had its Ford moment or its Tesla moment, if you want to put it that way. And that's what Valor Atomics is working on doing. We have nuclear reactors that are more manufactured than constructed and uh they're extremely safe and we think the combination of these two things is going to allow us to scale nuclear fision and make energy 10 times cheaper for humanity.
0:04:59 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsNow, nobody died, right? Uh in fact, not only did nobody die, nobody was injured and there was no radiation dose to the public. But, uh it was sort of a optics and PR situation um that was mismanaged in many many different ways and the public uh became fearful and and lost interest in nuclear.
0:06:44 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordswhat was missing is that people did not realize that you're going to have to pursue that model through hardware iteration. And that's where really where Valor is unique is that yes, we believe in SMRs, we believe in reactors that are manufactured, but we also know that in order to get there, you have to do it through hardware iteration.
0:07:53 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsif you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valor, it's mostly a modeling and simulation uh industry. Like when you think of a nuclear company, right, there's like nuclear companies out there that everyone knows the name of. And you kind of look under the cover. It's actually a modeling and simulation company, right? They produce um very very precise what we call paper reactors which have really good predictions of how a theoretical thing might behave.
0:09:56 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsit's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
0:16:49 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsNuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
0:18:00 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThe alternative way that you can reduce risk is actually just reducing consequence, right? And we would argue that that's a much better way to reduce risk. Odds uh are stochastic, right? Even if you do an enormous amount of risk reduction on odds and you do all this engineering, something's still going to happen, right? like just something's going to come out of left field and you can't predict everything.
0:22:40 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI would make one big division in nuclear companies and it is people who believe that nuclear is essentially a hardware execution problem and people who believe that it's a design problem. Um Valor is solidly in the camp that we believe this is a hardware and execution problem.
0:23:41 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut the problem of nuclear today is like the Toyota Camry problem, right? Like we don't want to make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. Um and actually that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world, right?
0:25:47 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsUm and we will get it down to minutes. Um this company will get will will get to the point where we have a new reactor turning on every few minutes.
0:25:55 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsif you look at the um the economics of nuclear it really is driven by how quickly and cheaply can you produce plants right the uranium is very cheap right the the fuel is very cheap. The question is, can you produce plants quickly and cheaply?
0:33:58 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsenergy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price, right? So if you can reduce the price, you increase the demand.
0:37:59 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsif you're looking at the nuclear space today, you don't expect people to have this problem solved in 2031. In fact, I would say even 2035, a lot of these companies are still not going to get there because they have the wrong mindset.
0:46:18 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsUm everywhere in nuclear is like this. There are uh totally fake costs from an industry that is just totally anemic and doesn't know how to build anything anymore.
0:49:18 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is um, we know the physics works. We know that there's infinite demand and how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in the United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world.
0:55:11 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI know that nuclear fision will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. somebody will do that and it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's going to be in the future decades or the future centuries
0:55:48 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsEnergy is the fundamental input to uh the quality of human life. U if you look backward into time and say how did humanity go from one standard of living to the next, it's always unlocked by cheaper energy, right?
1:00:20 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIf you keep asking this question, what you realize is energy is the fundamental input. When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi-aututonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things, right? The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it.