Utah wasn’t the only state vying to be the site of a small nuclear test reactor that Valar Atomics plans to build, according to the startup’s founder, 25-year-old Isaiah Taylor.
“To be honest, it was a tight race,” he said, not naming the other competitors in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune. But Utah Gov. Spencer Cox convinced Taylor, he said, that “Utah is the place where we get to do innovation.”
Cox and Taylor announced Friday that they expect a nuclear test reactor built by the California company to be up and running in Emery County by next year. Test reactors are “used for research, training, or development” and don’t produce electrical power, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Tribune has filed a public records request for the agreement between Valar and the Utah Office of Energy Development (OED). The governor’s office did not respond to requests for additional information about the announced partnership, but a spokesperson for OED said lawyers are working through “sensitive information” and intellectual property. “The details have to be figured out as well,” the spokesperson said.
“Governor Cox really got my attention in his being able to step out here and name the problem … which is that the regulators have become extremely overactive and have imposed burdens that are well, well beyond other countries,” Taylor said.
Valar last month joined a lawsuit Utah filed against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, contending that the agency’s rules for small nuclear reactors “hinder the development of safe and reliable nuclear power.”
In the lawsuit, Utah and four other states — Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Arizona — argue that small nuclear reactors, like the ones Valar eventually wants to build, should not have to obtain a license from the NRC for construction or operation because they use less nuclear fuel and do not threaten public health or safety. Along with Valar, nuclear startups Last Energy Inc. of Washington, D.C., and Deep Fission Inc. of California have joined the case.
Taylor said a favorable ruling could mean states “running their own mini-nuclear industries,” without as much federal oversight. That possibility, combined with recent actions by the Trump administration, he said, “is going to lead to a nuclear renaissance in Utah.”
On Friday, President Donald Trump issued executive orders directing the U.S. Department of Energy and the NRC to streamline nuclear reactor testing and fast-track the construction of nuclear power plants.
“What the [Utah] governor and I did here is in direct response to the president’s mandate,” Taylor said. “This partnership is saying, ‘This company and this state are ready to lead that charge.’”
What is Valar Atomics?
The nuclear energy startup was founded in 2023. So far, it has not built a nuclear reactor.
It has $21 million in funding and has entered into a research contract with the Philippines Nuclear Research Institute to launch its first reactor there, Business Insider reported. “We’re going to move really fast” on that project, Taylor told the outlet.
Valar claims the approach it plans to take will make nuclear energy more affordable and scalable by building thousands of small modular reactors on a single site, which the company calls a “gigasite.”
“It allows you to produce very cheap energy because all of the complexity is already dealt with on the first couple of reactors,” Taylor told Business Insider in February.
Small modular reactors, or SMRs, can produce up to 300 megawatts of electricity, or about one-third the output of a traditional nuclear plant. That amount of electricity could power roughly 300,000 homes. They are also far smaller, ranging anywhere between one-quarter to one-tenth of the footprint of a traditional reactor, according to the Idaho National Laboratory.
No SMRs have been built in the U.S.; only Russia and China have operating SMRs. But many companies are developing designs, and proponents say the technology will be cheaper and safer than traditional reactors, produce less nuclear waste and can be installed in remote places.
Detractors argue that potential benefits don’t outweigh the safety concerns.
“Fast-tracking an unproven nuclear project like the one in Emery County wastes taxpayer dollars on a risky industry with a long track record of cost overruns and delays,” said Carmen ValDez, a policy associate with the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah. “Instead of propping up nuclear fantasies, we should be investing in clean, proven renewable energy that can power Utah’s future now — not decades from now.”
Valar, rather than trying to deliver energy to the grid that provides electricity for homes and businesses, wants to build gigasites next to entities that need a lot of energy, like data centers.
The company’s chief nuclear officer, Mike Mitchell, has over 20 years of “expertise” in advanced nuclear reactors, Valar’s website says. He worked on the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor in South Africa, one of the world’s first small nuclear reactor projects, though a planned test reactor there was never built and the program was abandoned in 2010.
He started the microreactor program for the U.S.-based company Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp.,according to a news release, which says it is working to get its planned small nuclear reactors licensed in the U.S. and Canada, with units scheduled for demonstration in 2026.
Ultra Safe Nuclear says it is the only private company producing the type of nuclear fuel that Valar plans to use in its reactors.
What do we know about Valar’s partnership with Utah?
The test reactor will be developed in Emery County at the San Rafael Energy Research Center “very, very soon,” Cox said Friday, with the goal of having it running in 2026.
“The details on the exact nature of the partnership will be coming out over the next couple of months,” Taylor said.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) At the San Rafael Energy Research Center in Emery County, a worker welds inside the L1500 boiler/furnace, which can be used to study fuels.
Utah leaders have said they want the state to be “one of the nuclear headquarters of the world.” Last year, Cox unveiled a plan to double Utah’s energy production within the next decade, and the Utah Legislature committed $10 million toward developing nuclear power infrastructure. Nuclear energy is a carbon-free power source.
Who is Valar’s founder, Isaiah Taylor?
Taylor dropped out of high school at 16 and did not attend college, he wrote in a post on X. He grew up on food stamps and his first job was cleaning barns at age 11 in Kentucky, he wrote. But at night, he taught himself how to code.
He started an auto repair shop with money he made from freelance software engineering and coding projects, he wrote on X, before founding Valar when he was 24.
His biography on the company’s website describes him as a “self-taught engineer” who was “inspired by his family heritage on the Manhattan Project.” His great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, joined the Manhattan Project at age 24, Taylor explained on X.
What is a test nuclear reactor?
Test nuclear reactors are used in research, not to generate electrical power, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently regulates 31 operating test and research reactors. The commission is responsible for licensing and inspecting test reactors.
Building a new test reactor is useful because the U.S. is “out of practice” when it comes to nuclear, Taylor said. “This test reactor is about flexing those muscles again and redeveloping the technology to some extent and making sure it’s ready for prime time.”
“The test isn’t about, ‘Oh, we’re trying to discover some novel break,’” he continued. “It’s more about exercising the muscles as regulators, as a state, as an organization so we can turn these reactors on and operate them.”
The hope, Taylor said, is to build and refine Valar’s test reactor and eventually transition it into a commercial unit.
With Utah’s enthusiasm about a test reactor, Taylor said, “the state is setting itself up to be the deployment location as well.”
“Whichever state owns the charge on that is going to get a lot of incredible industry,” he continued. “Not just nuclear, but data centers and advanced manufacturing.”
The University of Utah is home to a nuclear reactor that does not produce power. It was installed in 1975 and has been used primarily for research.
What does Valar Atomics say its nuclear reactors will be like?
The company says the small modular reactors it plans to build, including its test reactor in Utah, will be based on technology first developed decades ago that uses gas — in Valar’s case, helium, a common choice — as a coolant.
Valar says it plans to use TRISO fuel — which is different from the fuel rods used in traditional reactors. There is no such reactor in commercial operation anywhere in the country, said Chris Lohse, Innovation and Technology Manager for the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN), a U.S. Department of Energy initiative.
TRISO fuel, which stands for tri-structural isotropic, consists of kernels of uranium fuel, each about the size of a grain of rice, wrapped in layers of carbon and silicon carbide. This type of fuel “dissipates heat,” Lohse said.
“This is an inherent safety feature, inherent in the way the fuel is designed and developed,” Lohse continued. “They call it ‘the most robust fuel on Earth’ … and it basically helps prevent things from melting down.”
This type of fuel, however, produces a higher volume of nuclear waste, Lohse said. The highly radioactive waste must be stored on the site where it is generated, according to the NRC, since the U.S. currently has no permanent disposal facility for nuclear waste.
Several companies have proposed using TRISO to fuel their advanced nuclear reactor designs and are in the process of obtaining a license to start construction from the NRC.
Valar says its reactor design proposes using helium gas to transfer fission-generated heat to a turbine, which then produces electricity. Traditional nuclear reactors use water to do that.
Still, “gas reactors are not new,” Lohse said. He added that helium is an inert gas, which means it isn’t likely to react with other substances.
Valar Atomics also claims it will be able to create synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from the heat generated by its nuclear reactors. That heat can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, Lohse said.
From there, Valar says it will be able to combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to eventually create jet fuel, diesel or gasoline.
Creating synthetic fuels by splitting water molecules isn’t new, Lohse explained, though the company may become the first to use the heat generated by nuclear reactors to do so.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Hunter Power Plant with the San Rafael Research Center in the foreground, in Emery County near Orangeville, on Thursday, July 21, 2022.