Inside America’s private nuclear energy effort

A Los Angeles-based company has built a small modular nuclear reactor prototype, in an effort to return the energy source to the grid globally.

“Nuclear was this incredible technology that we [America] created in the 1940s, scaled out in the 1950s, and unfortunately came to a halt,” Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor told Markets with Madison at its factory in El Segundo.

Taylor’s company, which he dreamed up a decade ago, then aged 16, just closed a US$19 million ($31.3m) seed funding round.

His company was 19 months old, however, he had a history with nuclear fission.

His great-grandfather worked on the United States Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the atomic bomb was born.

Taylor believed the years lost in nuclear innovation since then meant the energy technology’s progress, including in safety, had stalled.

“A safe nuclear industry is an industry that continues making reactors.

“And it also makes them smaller, and in a repeatable format.”

He planned to build thousands of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) and install them on land around the world, dubbed gigasites, generating energy for industrial use cases, such as data centres powering artificial intelligence.

It would begin in the Philippines with a 100-kilowatt reactor, where Valar had signed a research contract with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute.

The reincarnated role of nuclear would drastically reduce the costs of goods, including food, across economies, Taylor said.

“What we’re moving towards is really an era of abundance.”

Get up close to Valar Atomics’ reactor and hear more about its industrial energy goals, in today’s episode of Markets with Madison above.

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Disclaimer: The information provided in this programme is of a general nature, and is not intended to be personalised financial advice. We encourage you to seek appropriate advice from a qualified professional to suit your individual circumstances.

Madison Malone (nee Reidy) is host and executive producer of the investment show Markets with Madison. She joined the Herald in 2022 after working in investment, and has covered business and economics for television and radio broadcasters.