Companies developing small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) have collected more than $ 1.5 billion in the past year, while technological companies are hungry to be able to train models and IA governments decide to ‘Engage in industry.
For example, X-Energy raised $ 700 million This month, and Newcleo, based in Paris, lifted $ 151 million Last year, and it would be negligent not to mention the $ 700 million invested in Oklo, Nuscale and Nano Nuclear for projects similar to the United States
While nuclear fusion still seems relatively distant, SMRs are the hot atomic property today. It is therefore significant that the SMR startup Valar atomic Has $ 19 million in a seed financing cycle to develop its first test reactor. The funding was led by Riot Ventures, with AlleyCorp, the initialization of the capital, the first day and the participating steel atlas.
VALAR SMR technology is based on a high temperature gas reactor cooled by helium. These will be built from a nuclear equivalent of a “gigafactory” (where the batteries are built), except that Valar calls them “gigasites”. By effectively creating an SMR production chain, Valar hopes to considerably reduce the costs associated with the construction of nuclear reactors, which are traditionally tailor -made projects.
Valar’s co-founder and CEO, Isaiah Taylor, told Techcrunch that the constraint on construction reactors was not as much technology as the way it is deployed. He hopes that Valar’s “Gigafactory” approach could repair this by being “industrial” instead of “artisanal”.
The company plans to build hundreds of SMRs on sites mainly out of network with electrical data centers and industrial factories. He has a first contract with the Philippine nuclear research institute to build a reactor in the country. As part of the contract, Valar plans to control a testing scale reactor and build two large -scale reactors before the first integrated reactor is online.
“We are going to do the first, the second, the third, and that will evolve organically in the factory,” he said.
Valar’s underlying technology uses gas helium to reach temperatures up to 900 ° C – triple that of conventional nuclear reactors. This means that Valar could also produce hydrogen effectively and combine it with CO2 captured to create synthetic fuel with low carbon content for vehicles and infrastructure.
“If you can get such a hot nuclear reactor, you can produce hydrogen at a very cheap and unlock all kinds of things. One of these things being synthetic fuels. We want to be able to make this process cheap and make reactors cheap too, ”said Taylor.
“We have designed, designed and built our thermal test unit in a period of about 10 months. It is possible-after all, the first nuclear reactor was built in eight months in 1943, “he added.
Taylor, whose grandfather was, by coincidence, a nuclear physicist for the Manhattan project, abandoned the school at 16 and continued its software systems as well as startups. The technical efforts of the company are led by its nuclear director, Mark Mitchell (The former president of the Société de modular modular Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) and leader of the first small modular reactor project in the world to the modular reactor of Pebble Bed in South Africa). The startup team also has several USNC people, including its mechanical engineering manager, Willem Van Rooyen.
Although the company’s plans are ambitious, there seem to be many rear winds for such nuclear projects. The United States Inflation reduction law has unlocked private investment in clean energy infrastructure, while China is also Invest $ 440 billion in new nuclear power plants. More, 14 of the biggest banks in the world expressed their support for nuclear energy tripled by 2050.
