Why Trump Officials and VCs Love This Nuclear Power Startup’s Brute-Force Approach

On a cloudy day in late March, Isaiah Taylor, the 27-year-old founder and chief executive of Valar Atomics, a Hawthorne, Calif.–based nuclear energy startup, led me into a large black tent at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in the middle of the Utah desert. Dozens of construction workers and beeping forklifts buzzed around the nearly 40-foot-tall reactor rising from the center of the tent, with an enormous American flag in the background.

Outside, Taylor gestured around to the empty landscape surrounding the site, which Valar is leasing from the state of Utah. “Six months ago, this looked like that field out there,” he said, pointing to the untouched beige ground stretching toward the mountains. “We built this in six months.”

Six months ago is around the time Valar was selected as one of 11 startups in a Department of Energy pilot program aimed at getting nuclear power startups to reach criticality—the point at which their reactors produce power through self-perpetuating chain reactions—by July 4. Carrying out orders from President Donald Trump’s White House, the agency coupled this program with a sweeping overhaul of its regulatory process and safety rules to make it easier and faster to build reactors.