Thread by @isaiah_p_taylor

This morning Samo Burja went on a podcast with some very hard words for nuclear energy. I want address them immediately. But not because he's wrong.

Instead, because he got a few CRUCIAL things right; and the hard truths he tells go to the core of why I started Valar Atomics.

Burja argues two things:

1. Energy demand is unexpectedly low.
2. In order to make anything cheap, you need to make thousands of it. Nuclear is too powerful and energy demand too anemic to justify thousands of reactors. There's no market!

(he's right; I'll get to that shortly)

First, what he gets right: energy consumption in the US and much of the western world has flatlined in the last 20 years, after tepid growth since 1970. And in the same time, the inflation-adjusted price of energy has stagnated or risen.

I have three massive caveats to this. The first is the obvious one: while the 1st world may be stagnating in demand, the rest of the world is going VERTICAL. This curve is going to slow down any time soon. Massive swaths of earth's population are growing and want more energy.

Second, regardless of energy growth, a society that spends $5T on a thing is STARVED FOR THAT THING. The price tag alone is a massive, screaming boombox saying "I NEED CHEAPER ENERGY." Cheaper energy means a better human experience on nearly every front.

Finally, as he does to point out: energy is a market that creates its own demand. The more energy we make at a lower price, the more we productively use. I see no theoretical limit to this. Coal and oil unlocked the industrial revolution. Who knows what the atomic age will bring!

Now, to the meat.

Burja's central claim is that there's no demand for thousands of nuclear reactors, and so nuclear reactors can never become cheap. Let's examine that.

Earth is presently a 20.5TW society (that's a continuous figure). To produce that amount of energy, you'd need 60,000 gigawatt-scale nuclear reactors.

60,000 is more than enough units to get on an industrial cost curve; for comparison, only 11k Boeing 737s have every been made.

So there's actually more than enough demand for energy today to make the thousands of reactors necessary to achieve industrial learning rate and lower costs. Then what's the problem? Why does nuclear look the way it does right now?

Burja's right: it's not just regulation.

The problem is DISTRIBUTION. Nuclear energy is synonymous with generating electricity. This fact is the source of all of atomic energy's woes.

Electricity is a TERRIBLE PRODUCT.

A good product can be transported in volume through space and time to where it is needed most.

Electricity is transportable through NEITHER space NOR time.

"But Isaiah, what about powerlines??"

Fair; I'll add nuance: it's not *dynamically* transportable through space. To change the destination of your electrical power, you need to change physical infrastructure!

It's also not transportable thru time: batteries are too pricy at grid scale. Electricity is sold soon after it is generated to a pre-connected customer. Imagine trying to run a flower shop that way! If you make a bouquet at 1am you'd better sell it at 2am; no matter the price!

This is the CORE PROBLEM of atomic energy: there is a fundamental mismatch between the low-density nature of electricity and electricity demand, and the power and complexity of nuclear technology. This leads to Burja's critique: there's no demand for thousands of reactors.

This was the foundational conclusion that I reached 6 years ago when I dropped out of high school. Inspired by my grandfather's work on the Manhattan Project, I wanted badly for atomic energy to work, and to produce abundant cheaper power for mankind—but NOT IN THE GRID. Not yet.

First, we must get nuclear technology onto the industrial curve. Burja is right, we must make thousands of them! And what's more, we need to make and deploy thousands of them *in one place*. (Most of the cost of nuclear has nothing to do with technology, but instead with siting.)

To break out of these costs, we need FEWER sites and MORE reactors. But if you do this, you run into the problem we mentioned above: electricity. Electricity is not a true product. It does not scale. It is not transportable through space and time.

I spent years wrestling the problem that Burja highlights. I wanted to find a way to make thousands of nuclear reactors and put them all in one place, while still selling the energy. I looked into HVDC transmission, then hydrogen, then alternative fuels like ammonia.

A year and a half ago I had my "eureka" moment; at around 1am, staring wistfully at a LNG tanker, wondering "how could I get that thing to carry liquid hydrogen instead? What would I coat it with?" Suddenly, I realized:

It already is!

LNG (methane) is CH4: 1 carbon, 4 hydrogen.

In a flash, I realized that the world already runs on hydrogen! But it's bonded with carbon for convenience. This fixes all the problems of hydrogen as a fuel (hydrocarbons are far denser and don't leak through or embrittle metals) without trading off gravimetric power density.

I didn't sleep that night. I didn't go to work the next day. Instead, practically holding my breath, I dug deep to answer the question: "If I get reactors as cheap as I think I can, could I use synthesize methane and jet fuel and use them as the rails for atomic power?"

The answer is yes! Carbon capture is now developed enough to provide low-cost CO2; and I know that by making thousands of nuclear reactors on a single site, we can make the cheap hydrogen needed. H2 + CO2 = cheap, abundant synthetic hydrocarbons; the best rails for atomic energy.

Interestingly, Burja highlights this as one of the possible catalysts for the atomic age!

But unlike Burja, I don't believe it will be subsidized. I've done the math: fuel from Valar Atomics will be *cheaper* than from the oil and gas industry due to better scale and simplicity.

The fuel market enables us to make thousands of reactors. But we won't stop there. Once we're making thousands of reactors, we will have crossed the threshold that Burja highlights and gathered the mass of operational and safety data needed to take mankind into the Atomic Age.

The last time mankind switched to a source of power that was an order of magnitude cheaper, it sparked the industrial revolution. Right now, we're at the footsteps of perhaps a steeper mountain: becoming multiplanetary, harnessing artificial intelligence, and living longer lives.

The Valar team is working on our prototype reactor right now in El Segundo! We're focused on finally cracking atomic energy, the right way: by making thousands of nuclear reactors all in one place.

See Samo's full pod here, starting at the 53m mark.

https://x.com/NewFounding/status/1777745362800792013