Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 08/11/2026 4:23:48 PM PDT by grundle
At 16 years old, Isaiah Taylor realized nuclear reactors were being made too big. At 19, he married his childhood sweetheart, Sophie, and at 24 he founded Valar Atomics.
“I’ve always just kind of known what I wanted,” the young founder told the Deseret News. “I want to build nuclear reactors, and I wanted to get married to Sophie. So why wait?”
The Southern California-based company is a manifestation of his original vision: nuclear reactors need to be smaller, safer and made on a factory line.
Now, at 27, Taylor plans to see his first microreactor come alive in Orangeville, Utah, on the Fourth of July.
After breaking ground in Emery County last September, Valar employees have made themselves at home in central Utah.
On a recent trip down to the site, I met some of them. Mainly young men, they sat together at lunch, eating steak and macaroni, discussing how to revolutionize the American energy market.
Two big fridges sit in the corner of their warehouse, filled with various sodas and wellness shots. Up and to the left stands a massive plywood platform, where engineers quietly study their double monitors.
Many of these employees flew with the five-megawatt reactor aboard three Air Force cargo planes in February, when the U.S. military aided the airlift from California to Utah’s Hill Air Force Base. The flight demonstrated the country’s ability to rapidly deploy reliable energy anywhere.
But getting to this point has been no small task.
A descendant of the Manhattan Project dreams of nuclear energy
Taylor’s great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, was a nuclear physicist for the Manhattan Project, which produced America’s first nuclear weapons.
Just six months after getting married, Schaap and his wife moved to the so-called “Secret City,” Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There, Taylor’s grandmother was born in the Army field hospital, and her grandson grew up dreaming about nuclear reactors.
Alongside reading encyclopedias on nuclear power, Taylor spent much of his childhood learning how to code. A software engineer at his church introduced him to a coding language for kids when he was about 10 years old.
“I got into software because I was really curious and it was fun,” he explained. “I actually never thought it was a way to make money; it was just a cool thing. It felt like a fun game to play.”
This perspective has guided Taylor through various technical problems. “I think that’s what engineering has been. It’s just really fun problems to solve,” he said.
By the time he was 16, Taylor had branched into other coding areas and decided he was going to start Valar. He just didn’t know how to go about it yet.
“I realized if I was going to start a company that’s this hard — nuclear reactors are really hard — I probably needed to start other companies first, get experience, and eventually I’d be ready to start Valar,” he said.
So that’s what Taylor did. He dropped out of high school at 16 and started an auto repair shop.
At 17, Taylor was living in Moscow, Idaho. He randomly met then-18-year-old Kip Mock in the hallway at their apartment complex.
Mock had tickets to go to a Jon Bellion concert. The friend he was planning on going with bailed, and “the only person I had met in town who wasn’t also in college was Isaiah,” Mock told the Deseret News.
“I texted him, I was like, ‘Hey, do you want to go to this concert? I’m leaving in 15 minutes. It’s a five-hour drive,’ And he was like, ‘Sure,’” Mock said. “We kind of became actual friends on that drive.”
At the time, he and Taylor were self-described “gearheads.” Taylor had a Fiat, and Mock had an Audi. While Taylor enjoyed doing some car repairs himself, they had a mutual friend named Jonathan who was often enlisted to do extensive work on their cars.
In the middle of winter, atop six inches of packed ice, Jonathan would roll underneath their cars in his driveway. “We were like, ‘Oh man, this is terrible,’” Kip said laughing.
“He’s an excellent mechanic, so Isaiah and I were like, ‘Well, we should just start an auto shop and have this guy Jonathan run it. So we did,” Mock said.
Between the two, Mock and Taylor had about $20,000 to start the shop. “We thought it was enough, but it turned out it wasn’t — surprise, surprise.” Taylor was working a software job at the time, so “he basically paid the bills while I ran the shop for about a year and a half until we got it off the ground.” It ended up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, but “we learned a lot about how business actually works.”
Taylor described the experience as a “mini MBA.” Through their auto shop, they learned how to hire and manage people, and how to acquire a company, sell another and plan a merger.
“The company actually worked really well. It succeeded; it’s a great business,” Taylor said. Though Mock and Taylor sold their shares of Erber Auto when Taylor started Valar, it’s still operating in Moscow.
Next, Taylor started a software startup in the automotive space. This business failed, which Taylor takes as a blessing. “I think it’s important to get one hard failure under your belt,” he said.
After his software company, Taylor briefly worked for a hedge fund and “did some stuff for the Department of Defense on the engineering side,” just to continue “sharpening my engineering abilities.”
Taylor founded Valar Atomics on the Fourth of July in 2023, and Mock joined about six months later. After founding another company, Mock currently serves as Valar’s head of operations.
The product
For as much self-study as Taylor has done on nuclear energy, he knew he’d need an excellent and experienced team to design his reactor.
Valar drew in Mark Mitchell, who previously served as president of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation; Willem Kriel, who told the Deseret News that he came out of retirement and postponed a lengthy fishing trip to help lead the engineering team; and Muhammad Shahzad, the former president and CFO of Relativity Space, an aerospace manufacturer.
“As a company, Valar has hired an enormous amount of extremely talented people who have Ph.D.s, who have been in nuclear engineering companies, who have built some of the most impressive projects in the last 25 years,” Taylor told the Deseret News.
The reactor they designed is focused on safety.
Instead of water, Valar uses helium as a coolant.
Nick Touran, a nuclear engineer who spent 16 years at TerraPower, told the Deseret News what he believes are the advantages of using helium.
Helium first popped up as a potential coolant in the 1940s, after being proposed by Manhattan Project engineer Farrington Daniels. “One cool thing about helium is that it can go to really high temperatures without having any corrosion issues,” Touran said.
The gas also doesn’t become radioactive as it passes through the core.
Taylor’s team also developed a “self-tensioning concrete shielding system” to protect workers from gamma radiation. The large curved blocks can be quickly stacked and unstacked around the reactor with a permanent crane, and they’re manufactured in Salt Lake City. When put together, the system looks like a cube of massive grey Legos.
“What’s really cool about this is that they’re self-tensioning, meaning we don’t have to join them together,” Taylor said. “They self-reinforce based on gravity.”
The blocks are made of a custom concrete mix, which is designed to attenuate radiation.
“This has never happened in a reactor before,” Taylor said. “We designed this all from scratch, not just the exact shape of it and how it stacks together, but even the concrete mix. This concrete mix doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”
As for why his company settled on Utah as the place to split the atom, Taylor said he wanted to find a place where people understand energy, want manufacturing and metals, value manufacturing jobs and believe in hard work.
“We’re very, very happy in Utah,” he said. “It’s been phenomenal to build there.”
“Frankly, we probably wouldn’t put a nuclear reactor in California. They don’t really want those,” he said. “But you know, if they suddenly change their minds, they can give us a call.”
Taylor has high hopes for how much Valar will expand. “We would like to make as much power as Utah needs, and that could end up being a lot of power. So we think of this as a long term thing,” he said.
Valar’s influence on the nuclear energy market
Valar Atomics is one of a dozen startups developing small and micro nuclear reactors.
When asked how Valar compares to its peers, Touran said the company has pierced public sentiment like others have not.
“They have so many fanboys and cheerleaders, and I think they’ve captured the imagination of a crew that wasn’t into nuclear. They have this huge following that I think no one else has really achieved,” Touran said.
On top of reaching tech bros in Utah’s Silicon Slopes, Touran said he’s heard friends at established nuclear companies say, “Look at what Valar just did. They’re just cutting graphite, like, let’s go.”
Valar is demonstrating that they have an institutional capability to get things done, Touran added. “They’re well plugged in, they know the right people, they’re saying the right things to just make it happen.”
However, as countries including South Korea, China and Russia continue pumping out massive nuclear reactors, Touran said he hopes the U.S. doesn’t fall behind in large-scale nuclear development.
God, having children, and fixing American energy Taylor met Sophie when he was in first grade. “I’ve had a crush on her since I was very young,” he said. “I was 19, and she was 18 when we got married.”
Having grown up in a faithful Presbyterian home, it felt natural for Taylor to start his family young, he explained. He and Sophie had their first child when they were both 20. They now have four.
“Having children is a thing that you know you do, but until you have your first kid, it doesn’t click. Then you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this is the best thing in the entire world,’” he said. “And I think you understand the promises of scripture better.”
He referenced Psalm 128: “Yea, thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace upon Israel.”
“When you’re a single guy and you don’t have kids yet, you’re like, ‘Why do I care about that?’ Then you have a kid and you realize, ‘Oh, I really care about that.’ You begin thinking longer term, you think about generations and decades, not just the next six months,” he said.
Taylor’s children motivate him to make the world they grow up in a better place.
“We want to fix American energy, and a huge part of that comes from wanting a good future for your children,” he said. “You want America to be a place where we build things, where we have jobs, where we have industry, where our country is strong, where it’s well defended. All of these are long term goals. While we individually may or may not be here, our kids certainly will be.”
He continued, “I think that’s something that’s been missing in American industrial policy for the last 30 years. We took a very, very short-sighted view of industrial economics.”
From the 1970s through the ‘90s, the U.S. exported American industry, he explained. “That was a short-term financial decision that made many people rich, but now we don’t build things anymore.”
“So Valar is rapidly trying to reverse that. We want the United States to be a place where we have cheap enough energy to build the world’s heavy industry. We want to be able to make metals. We want to be able to bring aluminum back and mass manufacturing back and all these things that are good for the country,” he said.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
I would bet that Elon Musk has made a phone call or two to this guy. They might have stuff to talk about.
I have met a few, just a few people somewhat like this.
They know early in life what they want to have happen, and the lucky ones are within a family or the right environment that encourages and supports someone with big dreams, so long as your skill set matches your mid to long range goals.
The Big Dream of someone doesn’t have to be a nuclear reactor, it can be something as simple as a retail coat shop, or personalized handmade crafts.
I like the way this sounds.
That’s a great story and I hope they achieve all their ambitions.
I’m not impressed.
I built my first microreactor at age 22. It’s shown below. I’m not famous only because my apartment at the time did not have a 10,000 volt wall plug.
The guy was born a mature man. He was ready to create, build, procreate and quote scripture from his birth.
We need more people like Elon and this guy.
“What’s really cool about this is that they’re self-tensioning, meaning we don’t have to join them together,” Taylor said. “They self-reinforce based on gravity.”
Sounds dicey in an earthquake.
Just stay away from Mr. Wonderful
I am so happy to hear about a young man, well, young men, actually doing something, failing and starting again even bigger—rather than all these whiney bun-boys running around out there.
Married his sweet=heart and has a bucket if kidlets...whats not to like. I hope his company goes far and powers man to the stars if thats the plan...
there are a lot of small nuclear power companies to choose from these days.
but yeah, I have always wondered why musk has not created or bought a smr power company and juiced it up to produce smr’s at scale. that said, the answer looks to be that he has decided he can do better with solar. that giant manufacturing facility in grimes texas is going to include solar cell plant that produces terrawatts of solar power on earth and in space.
Very ELEGANT! 😊
wasn’t mr wonderful trying to build a data center powered by natural gas in utah. and then he was stymied by some chinese funded leftists.
🙌
So, how did it go? The story is from March...I’ll do a bit of searching.
Steak and macaroni!
“I texted him, I was like, ‘Hey, do you, like, want to build a reactor? I’m leaving in, like, 15 minutes. It’s a five-hour drive. We can, like, do a design ‘n stuff while we drive.’”
Be the first kid on your block to rule the world!
The benefit of small nuclear reactors is they can be close to the need for power. Single large reactors require electricity to travel for miles over power lines. Much power is lost and power lines are expensive to built.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.