It feels like there's so much piling up on top of each other that really creates this opportunity for people to get excited about nuclear in a way that we just haven't had in any of our lifetimes. Last week was a huge week: we've got four executive orders that unlock a ton of stuff, and you made a huge announcement with the governor of Utah about what you guys are building. There are a bunch of moving parts. Give us the quick summary. What are your takeaways, and what are you most excited about coming out of last week?

There are decades where nothing has happened, and then there's a week where decades happened. That was definitely last week, so we're really excited about it.

Look, the bottleneck on nuclear over the last 40 years has really been the regulatory environment. This was a controversial thing to say maybe three years ago, and increasingly less so over the last few years. But it's hard to argue with the data. The data is that the NRC has granted four construction permits in 45 years, and that's not a functional regulator. We have to move faster than that.

I think what's even more important than the commercial side is the innovation side, because innovation is what's actually going to drive the industry. You have to be able to test these reactors, build quickly, make them safe, and make them better, and that has to happen on quick timelines. R&D is all about these cycles. I think we've talked about this before, but you have to go through hardware cycles, and non-nuclear prototypes like the one behind me are definitely an important part of that. You also have to go full nuclear. You have to have companies that have done nuclear operations in advanced reactor architectures. That's not just because these are safer and better; it's also because they're built using modern tooling and supply chains. Even that needs real practice and real innovation and testing those supply chains out.

So I'm really, really excited about these orders. They are going to open up the regulatory environment for commercial, but also for earlier than that, to get through these R&D cycles.

Walk us through the regulatory piece, because to your point, the NRC has obviously been this really big bottleneck, and some aspects of the executive orders address that specifically. When you think about the blocking and tackling of what now becomes more viable, is it primarily about requirements like licensing deadlines? What do you feel are the biggest unlocks on the regulatory side?

There are specific pieces of language like that, like the 18 months and those sorts of things. Those are going to be really important, but they're more forcing functions and guideposts. The really important thing that's happening under the hood is going to be culture. Bureaucracies have culture and they have speed, and it's a big ship moving in a direction. We have to turn that ship really quickly, so you put these guideposts in the water, let's say, to show the organization where to go.

One thing that was emphasized, and I think this is really good emphasis, is that regulation generally follows industry, not the other way around. When you have a regulated industry, it generally started as just people building things, and then a regulator comes in and adds guardrails to something that already exists. It's very hard for a regulator to imagine a technology and then put guardrails around a thing that doesn't exist yet. That is what is being attempted with advanced reactors.

So the really important piece is not just reforming the NRC; it's revitalizing the DOE and reforming the NRC at the same time. You really want reactors to be built, operated, and tested with data, and then that informs the NRC revival process. We actually have real data to say, "This should have only taken 12 months. This didn't need that threshold over here. This didn't need that piece of analysis that was introduced in light water reactor land or in these extremely large plants." So you have to have both. The regulators can't regulate in a vacuum. They have to regulate real stuff in the real world, and so you do both at once.

One framing that I thought was really powerful was the DOE needing to become what it was always meant to be: a test agency focused on driving these tests. That's a good segue into what you guys are doing in Utah. How did that come to be, and what details can you share about the execution plan?

The headline is that the president put out this incredibly strong, fast mandate: we need three test reactors operating on American soil by July 4th, 2026, the 250th birthday of the United States. I think it would be an amazing 250th birthday present to the nation to have an advanced reactor operating on American soil.

Utah has really been leading the charge. Governor Cox gave a talk about a month ago that the Valar team was able to attend, and he was really leading the charge and saying, "Look, the states have to lead this. We have to be building." Utah is a plaintiff with us in our lawsuit against the NRC as well. They see that their state can lead on AI and manufacturing, and there are a couple of states that believe that today. So we're going to go out and try to hit that target. It's an ambitious target and an ambitious timeline, but the world's first nuclear reactors were built on those sorts of timelines. They were planned and built in under a year and brought to criticality.

So that's exactly what the DOE is for. It started as the ERDA, which is essentially a nuclear reactor test agency, and every time Congress has addressed the Department of Energy in legislation, it has continued to reaffirm that mandate. But in the DOE's entire history, it's only done this one time. There's only been one critical nuclear reactor that's come out of a DOE-exclusive licensing process. I think this is the shift from thinking about the DOE as a research agency, touching smaller aspects of nuclear energy and a bunch of other pies, to the agency that turns on nuclear reactors out in the desert and figures out how to regulate them, how to make them safe, and how to move quickly.

You have this lawsuit against the NRC with several states as well. Do the executive orders dramatically change the context of that? What's the update there, and how do you think about what you guys are doing to continue to put pressure on the regulatory environment?

I don't think it changes that significantly. We essentially view nuclear energy as a national security issue for the United States. We have to have more power if we are going to be a serious contender in the next 100 years as a society. Over the next 100 years, you're going to see societies that figure out cheap energy, AI, advanced manufacturing, robotics, and metals, all of these extremely critical things to maintaining a civilization, and countries that don't figure that out. We want to be one of the ones that figures it out.

So there are a bunch of different avenues and pathways to accomplish that. I do think there's a class of reactors that are small and safe that states will just regulate on their own, and that's going to be fantastic. And there are other classes of reactors that make sense to go through the DOE and then eventually the NRC. So we look at a diversity of pathways as a very good thing. You want competition between different regulatory environments, people who want to move fast, and people with different viewpoints. We think all of these are great things and good ways to move forward.

The branches of the military are being pushed to have nuclear procurement programs. What do you feel is the biggest sliding force in your favor? It feels like getting these groups on board gives us a ton of leverage to really push this forward.

I think there's an interesting shift going on here on the national security side. Nuclear national security used to mean entirely non-proliferation. It was directly related to how we make sure that US technology doesn't spread to people who we don't want to have it. While that's still extremely important, and we do need to have safeguards around it and make sure that we protect the information that we have, there's a new dynamic, which is that a lot of our geopolitical rivals are actually better at building nuclear than we are now.

China has 28 nuclear reactors under construction. They've turned on advanced reactors. They turned on a thorium fast reactor. Russia is turning on fast reactors, and they're building reactors all over the world. So there's a new dimension here that's informing national security, which is dominance. We actually need to catch up. We need to be dominant. We need to get ahead in building nuclear, because whoever builds nuclear is going to be good at nuclear. They're actually going to own the cutting edge.

So national security for nuclear doesn't just mean protecting what we've got in the basket. It actually means growing, and it means building. Frankly, we've built up these very high walls and high barriers in the interest of non-proliferation, in the interest of protecting what we have, and in the meantime, this slowed us down so much that we don't have the edge anymore. We don't have the monopoly anymore. So there's a new push to become dominant in that technology arena, and that's going to be really, really important for the future.

In every conversation about where America has fallen behind in various industrial categories, the ultimate bottleneck often becomes not just the will to do the thing but the adjacencies around it: whether we lack the expertise and technical knowledge, the raw materials, or an adjacent industry. I want to talk about Valar's approach specifically, but in general, it's great that we're getting this buy-in and the regulatory environment is changing that culture to allow us to push and experiment. Are there any key bottlenecks that are still going to be hurdles we have to get over to really push this to full capacity?

Absolutely. But I think what's really important is that those bottlenecks only get addressed by private companies who are fully vertically integrated figuring it out. Industry is very complex, technology is very complex, and there are many moving parts. Without one company that just says, "We're going to be the Ford of nuclear, we're going to be the Tesla of nuclear," it's hard to actually go find all of those pieces and assemble them in the right way. Whereas one company that owns that entire stack and is entirely focused on putting gigawatts of power down in the short term is going to find those bottlenecks, tackle them, and fix them, because it's our business to do that.

If you're trying to do that from the outside, as a third party, as the government trying to pick out those little pieces, you're not in that information-favored environment. You actually aren't necessarily looking at the critical path at all times. So I've kind of got those pieces in my head, feel a certain part of it. And yeah, we attack all of this.

Let's drill into that, because you and I have talked about this before offline. Compared with some of the limitations of larger, complex projects, your approach creates a lot of opportunities to move much more quickly. Give us the summary view of how you're thinking about the space and approaching it, how that plays into some of the regulatory changes we're seeing, and why you're excited about that.

Part of this is thinking about tooling. The types of machines that we're really good at making today are different from the types of machines we were really good at making in the '50s and '60s. We don't have as much large-scale industrial capacity as we used to have, so things like very large forgings are harder for us to make now than they were 50 or 60 years ago. There's just a different tool set of what we're really good at doing.

I believe that tool set is actually optimized for something around the size of a bus. We're really good at making bus-sized objects. If you go much bigger than that, it's actually pretty hard for us to do with the tooling that exists. So even though there's this theoretical concept that larger reactors are better, and that argument might hold up, when you actually look at industrial capacity and building quickly, which means building cheaply, because building fast and many is actually cheaper, then you actually want to go smaller. You want to use the tools that are available on the shelf and the supply chains that are already there and are already large, serving other industries. So we've picked a size here that we think is the right size to plug into oil and gas supply chains, supply chains for semiconductors, and other things that we currently do at scale.

The other thing is, when it goes to deploy, we realized your size of reactor doesn't actually have to be one-to-one correlated with your size of opportunity. If there's a customer that wants a gigawatt of power, we make 40 reactors for them. That's just fine. We're perfectly happy. In fact, we'd rather split that into chunks of 40, because that allows us to get repetition on the site, get better at what we're doing, and use a smaller pool of labor to do something over and over again, versus a very, very large pool of labor trying to do one very bespoke project.

It also allows our upfront capital to be a lot lower. CapEx is a really important part of this, and if you can start making money in lower-CapEx chunks and bring things on over time, you actually make the job a lot easier for yourself.

The last thing is that when you're doing a project and you have a delay, if there's a delay on a certain system or a part that's delayed, you're not tying up a massive multibillion-dollar project. You're not tying up billions of dollars of capital and tools and equipment and people. You're tying up something that's much smaller. These bite-sized chunks are just a lot more forgiving, and they allow you to scale out a lot more smoothly.

When you think about your position in terms of the critical opportunity here, there's also this function of compounding relationships: you're getting multiple stakeholders bought in on the supply side and the demand side. On the demand side, we talk all the time about AI and the massive energy appetite that AI has. Is that the clearest immediate use case, where people are tripping over themselves to find ways to turn on energy, or are there other aspects of demand that you think are going to be big drivers for your business?

AI data centers are the clear, screaming need from the market today that's using up all the air, so that's a really obvious one to tackle first. But look, the simple answer is that anybody who can make a machine that costs less than $3,000 a kilowatt and has low operating costs after that, make energy. If you can make that box and make it work, there's an enormous amount of demand for that all over the world.

I think the big secret of the nuclear industry is that this is actually not a demand problem. There's infinite demand for cheap energy. There always has been and always will be. What there's a lack of is companies that actually know how to perform: companies who know how to build that box, build it on time and on budget, and actually perform. So that's where all of our energy is focused today: that performance, making the reactors, making them work, and making them cheap.