I am going to be scattered and long winded so excuse my exhaustion and joy, as I have used up all of my focus in the excitement of a truly incredible moment.
I watched “our” reactor go critical on a livestream with the Valar team. Yesterday midafternoon on mountain standard time (around 1:45am for me on GMT+3) in the beautiful desert of Orangeville Utah, Valar Atomics took its Ward 250 critical for the first time.
Moments ago, Valar Atomics took Ward 250 critical for the first time. This fulfills President Trump’s EO 14301, which called for 3 advanced reactors to go critical by July 4th.
This is our second criticality as a company, and an important step toward our goal of power by July 4.
This is a historic moment and the culmination of two years of work on the part of the Valar Atomics team. This is the most hardcore, intelligent, and driven people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with; which will be seen as we begin power ascension in the coming days.
Our mission at Valar Atomics is to make abundant energy for all mankind. The best way to make energy 10x cheaper today is to mass-scale nuclear fission. We began our mission by creating WardZero, our fully functional thermal prototype. Next, we took the NOVA core critical.
Today, we took the next step: criticality in the Ward 250 test reactor. Ward 250 is a TRISO-fueled High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) designed for simplicity and scale, and is the first nuclear reactor ever air-lifted by a C-17.
We’ve been honored to be become part of the community in Orangeville, Utah, the home of Ward 250. Many thanks to all of our government partners who made this possible: hundreds of individuals across the Trump administration, the DOE, the DoW, and the government of Utah.
The list of individuals who have spent their time and energy and talents to accomplish this feat is too long to list in one post, but I am incredibly grateful to all of them.
I am one of those individuals who spent their time, energy, talents and capital to accomplish this incredible feat. It may well be the greatest accomplishments of my life.
I am Valar’s very first investor. I know it’s a little crazy that a weirdo like me should be investing in small modular nuclear reactors built by brilliant Zoomers and old timer nuclear engineers, but weird is how I invest with chaotic.capital. Crazy but possible made complete sense to me. And so we chewed glass for a few years while everyone told us it couldn’t be done.
Through the magic of Twitter DMs, I met Isaiah before he had even started Valar. I was impressed with his intelligence and knew immediately he had that ineffable “it” quality that all founders possess in some measure. I told him I’d back anything he did in the future and I meant it.
Fast forward several years and here we are. Just a few weeks ago I was racing through the desert to see the reactor our money helped build the day before it was encased in shielding in preparation to go critical.
We’ve been there for every step of this amazing journey. It was an objectively insane thing to invest in. Yet the more time I spent with Isaiah the more convinced I was that he was a generational talent.
I wrote the check and went about the long process of convincing others they should invest alongside me. It wasn’t easy. We got told no a lot. People ranged from outright hostility to tempered skepticism.
There were hard times. A lot of glass chewing. Alex and I were blessed with the opportunity to invest more and gladly wired in additional capital when others couldn’t see as far as we did. This may well be a career defining investment for me. I intend to keep putting in whatever Isaiah will allow us to invest.
Now three years into this journey, it’s clear to everyone that Isaiah is the talent I always knew him to be. I may have been first but I won’t be the last. This is the kind of company investors dream of finding early and Isaiah is a leader I am proud to follow. Valar is racing towards the kind of future I want to build for the next generation. Abundant cheap fuel can power a better cleaner world for all of us.
And to everyone who said it couldn’t be done, or that it was too early or too risky to invest in something as crazy as nuclear, please let me invite you to join us now. There is much more to be done. We will need all the talent and capital we can get to win this bright future for America and for humanity.