Valar Atomics Says It's the First Nuclear Startup To Achieve Criticality (wired.com) 48
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Startup Valar Atomics said on Monday that it achieved criticality -- an essential nuclear milestone -- with the help of one of the country's top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, claims that it is the first nuclear startup to create a critical fission reaction. It's also, more specifically, the first company in a special Department of Energy pilot program aiming to get at least three startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce it had achieved this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order President Donald Trump signed in May, has upended US regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones like criticality at a rapid pace.
There's a difference between the type of criticality Valar reached this week -- what's known as cold criticality or zero-power criticality -- and what's needed to actually create nuclear power. Nuclear reactors use heat to create power, but in cold criticality, which is used to test a reactor's design and physics, the reaction isn't strong enough to create enough heat to make power. The reactor that reached criticality this week is not actually Valar's own model, but rather a blend of the startup's fuel and technology with key structural components provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the DOE's research and development laboratories. The combination reactor builds off a separate fuel test performed last year at the laboratory, using fuel similar to what Valar's reactor will use. "Zero power criticality is a reactor's first heartbeat, proof the physics holds," Valar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. "This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering, one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership."
There's a difference between the type of criticality Valar reached this week -- what's known as cold criticality or zero-power criticality -- and what's needed to actually create nuclear power. Nuclear reactors use heat to create power, but in cold criticality, which is used to test a reactor's design and physics, the reaction isn't strong enough to create enough heat to make power. The reactor that reached criticality this week is not actually Valar's own model, but rather a blend of the startup's fuel and technology with key structural components provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the DOE's research and development laboratories. The combination reactor builds off a separate fuel test performed last year at the laboratory, using fuel similar to what Valar's reactor will use. "Zero power criticality is a reactor's first heartbeat, proof the physics holds," Valar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. "This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering, one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership."
So what they're saying is... (Score:2)
We haven't really achieved anything at all, not really, but needed to say something, so we waved our arms a bit and made it up on the spot.
Don't get me wrong, it is an important first step, but it does not mark a the dawn of a new era, not until they can prove sustainable power can they claim that.
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What they achieved might be the equivalent of a car that had the engine start but nobody has touched the throttle yet to get it above idle or put the transmission in gear to get the car to move. Or rather the car isn't built yet but this is like the 1890s and someone just proved that a diesel engine can run. The next step for the diesel engine is to put some kind of load on it and turn up the throttle, which for the nuclear reactor might be something like putting a heat sink of some sort on it and seeing
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Who is Valar Atomics? (Score:4, Informative)
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The AGR lives again!
The finest British technolgy. [wikipedia.org]
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If you think of "valar morghulis", the combination with "atomics" sure gets scary...
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I hope the Tolkien estate sues all of them. You know a company is associated with Peter Theil if it has a LOTR name.
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not that easy (Score:1)
Trademark law doesn't let you own every use of a word you first put into a book. These books are going to start going into the public domain soon anyway (which is why estate has been so loose on licensing lately -- there will be trash adaptations whether or not they get paid so they might as well get paid) -- Hobbit goes PD in 2032.
To be really clear, once you stop using a trademark for a specific purpose it's up for grabs. It's why there are so many shitty "Minolta" cameras being sold now because Sony wasn
It would have been interesting... (Score:2)
...to get a short explanation of why this is interesting. We already have nuclear fission.
Is the emphasis on startup here? Or are they doing something revolutionary?
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They have managed to get enough VC funding that the heap of dollar bills has started to compost and generate heat.
As others have posted, it does look like the AGR from the 1960s only maybe now with AI and blockchain?
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Nuclear fission is dirty. Its waste products need to be carefully and securely stored for thousands of years. Don't get me wrong -- it's one of the cleanest options we currently have for scalable power generation -- but it's dirty dirty dirty. Fusion's waste products are safe and non-radioactive.
Oh, and even disregarding waste products, it's safer. Not entirely safe, but a fusion reactor explodes, nobody outside the blast radius is going to be hurt, ever. If a fisison reactor melts down, the place where tha
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...aaand I misread your post. Yeah, no, it's an overhyped press release.
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It also compares poorly to pixie dust in many respects which is far closer to working than fusion.
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Re:It would have been interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no nuclear expert, but my understanding is that you start off with some fuel (uranium or whatever), which apart from a bit of radiation is essentially useless. You have to turn that into electricity, so you refine it and then use it in a reactor. You need to hit it up with some neutrons to split its atoms, whereupon it'll release more neutrons. Those then split more atoms, and so on - that's criticality. Further, you need to be able to calm the system down too, or else it'll run-away (meltdown), so you need some boron to absorb some of the neutrons so they don't cause more splits to take place. Across all of that lot, you need to get rid of a lot of heat too. Eventually you can use that heat to make steam and turn a turbine, but that comes quite a bit later in proceedings.
To get that far means you've solved a lot of the engineering problems associated with any sort of nuclear anything. The fact you have it running, your staff haven't all grown two heads, the reactor hasn't blown up, and it *stays running* means you're well one the road to making a full-blown nuclear power plant. In itself it's not terribly useful, but without it nothing at all can happen, so it's an important milestone.
You'll also note that (for example), the UK started building a nuclear power station in 2024, and it's not expected to be finished for about 9-12 years. They'll still be pouring concrete for several years, let alone gaining criticality (they don't need to experiment with the engineering as it's all just copied from other reactors, so they can go a bit quicker because of that). The British project will also be pouring a load of concrete in the form of safety systems - the intent being that even if a dozen other things go wrong, a meltdown type accident won't cause a Chernobyl type outcome where vast swathes of land become unusable for a few decades.
So on the face of it, these folks have done a great thing here - they're moving really fast to prove out a lot of their technology. It remains to be seen if they can actually build a long-running reactor, make electricity from it and run it as well as a traditional station. Sadly, we might only know the answer to that if they have an accident, and how they recover from it. Then of course there's the cost of the electricity... can they make that cheap enough that this makes any sense? Again, remains to be seen.
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The Chinese build nuclear reactors in around six years from breaking ground to connecting to the grid. They've licensed 30 of them to be built in the last three years, and are exporting 15 more. Unfortunately we're not allowed to buy their tech.
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I'm not super certain of the details, but my understanding is that they have a pretty standard sort of reactor, and have just made all the parts for it cheaply and so can make the whole thing cheaply. I assume they'd also supply the manpower to pour the concrete and so on - again, cheap. Hell, they might even ship in the concrete itself because they can probably do that more cheaply than you can locally (given it's all high grade stuff, you can't just get it from your DIY store).
What I don't know is the rel
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OK, but in the 1970s the French Government also took 6 years to build each of the 37 reactors they built in a decade - and their safety record is fine.
You can build a safe and reliable reactor in 6 years if you get on with the job.
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My understanding is that the exports are going out under the Belt & Road Initiative, so as much as possible is done with local labor (so the opposite of IMF/World Bank programs), and local people are trained to manage it as well. This is one of several reasons why Belt & Road is replacing IMF infrastructure funding throughout the Third World, rather than having KBR come in and build facilities to support the foreign extraction industries and then abandoning the project to decay they're creating bot
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The delay to UK reactors is entirely because of NIMBYs and inconsistent decision-making.
Once you actually commit to building a reactor and stay committed, it takes 4-6 years from zero to sending power to the grid. This is about the same time as any other large scale construction project - large bridges, large railway tunnels, large airports, etc.
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They achieved a nuclear criticality in a national lab devoted to nuclear criticality research since the 1940s, using lab facilities, equipment, and expertise.
Not exactly the technical triumph you're describing.
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...to get a short explanation of why this is interesting. We already have nuclear fission.
Is the emphasis on startup here? Or are they doing something revolutionary?
The "achievement" is creating IPO bait. Pretty sure that's all this announcement is about.
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There's now a push to deregulate building nuclear power plants (with gov't partnership).
US is hoping to have 5 companies post zero-power criticallity within a year of starting this program back in July.
A company reaching this point in 4 months is pretty quick development.
Make me wonder how long before MicroSoft Atomics is a thing?
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Until this moment nuclear fission had never been achieved with H1Bs but now that Valar has bravely crossed this threshold all nuclear facilities can slash energy costs by laying off domestic workers and insourcing or even more by outsourcing their safety monitoring to call centers in India.
Still they will probably limit this to centers with low overprovisioning, the nuclear safety agent with also be pretending to be an expert on Bluecoat proxy and AD but he PROBABLY won't be on more than two calls at a time
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It's a press release, specifically because this company needed to put out a press release.
If they had an NRC-licensed design for a reactor, that would be something worth reporting. Or even if they were building a prototype in order to demonstrate safe operation. But they aren't, so instead they're doing a "we rubbed some isotopes together at Los Alamos and now here's a press release about it" self-congratulatory press release.
And then Fermi walks in (Score:2)
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“We designed, engineered, and constructed our thermal test unit in a period of about 10 months. It’s possible — after all, the first nuclear reactor ever was built in eight months, in 1943,” he added.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02... [techcrunch.com]
Small Modular Reactors (Score:2)
The link below lists some of the main players in the SMR space. Notably, X-Power claimed it had achieved criticality for its HTGR in 2021. So perhaps Valar isn't the first, but this isn't my field.
https://c3newsmag.com/five-of-... [c3newsmag.com]
you know (Score:3)
"nuclear startup" are two words that scare the hell out of me when they're put together
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I was more bothered by his stressing the word "speed".
"Move fast and break things" (Score:2)
Criticality is not hard... (Score:2)
Achieving criticality is not much of an achievement - even the North Koreans can do it.
Running a reactor safely for decades is more of an achievement. I don't like the phrase "nuclear startup" in this context .
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Criticallity is easy; just take out the screwdriver.
*Controlled* chain reactions, on the other hand.....
Society had better be ready for (Score:2)
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Stockton Rush is a rare example of a tech bro who didn't get to walk away from his monumental fuckup and leave the rest of us to clean up his mess. Fortunately for us, his collapsible submarine only murdered a few people, along with the "genius" himself. We're just lucky Rush didn't decide he liked reactors more than submarines. No doubt that deficiency in America's tech bro-volution will soon be rectified.
If I weren't an atheist, I'd say, "God help us all".
I told Valar their reactor was badly designed (Score:2)
The next day it exploded.
Too critical ?
Criticallity explained (Score:2)
Simplified so smart children can understand it:
Nuclear power is just using radiation to heat water (or something else that is later used to heat water), then using the steam to turn a turbine, connected to magnets creating electricity in wires near the magnets. To do this we need a source of radiation that is consistent. To much and it gets so hot it melts everything near it ( 'melt down'). Too little and the radiation is not sufficient to keep going.
Radiation is when you spew out atomic particles - w
Wait, the others haven't even reached that? (Score:2)
I mean criticality is the most basic thing you need to reach in order to have a chance at any sustained fission.... if you have a high enough density of the right materials, it'll happen all by itself. It feels like that's something your "Nuclear Startup" would need to show to investors before you get any money.
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It feels like that's something your "Nuclear Startup" would need to show to investors before you get any money.
Correct. And yet it costs money to do this. So to get pre-funding money, you either need to already be rich, or have public interests funding it.