Valar Atomics Says It's the First Nuclear Startup to Achieve Criticality

Non-paywall coverage:

https://thebreakthrough.org/press/valar-atomics-achieves-fir...

Serious question: Why exactly is this impressive? They've raised over 100 million and hired scientists who know how to do this (and collaborated with Los Alamos), what exactly is the thing that is making this go viral.

They used old TRISO fuel from General Atomics, not their own new fuel.

They used their connections to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to get priority access at LANL, who provided nuclear engineering services and an existing critical facility (including building, safeguards, instrumentation, controls, rigging hardware).

LANL operated the facility to bring it to cold critical.

This is a cool milestone for sure, but bringing legacy enriched uranium critical isn't really interesting from an engineering perspective. I think they just wanted to claim to be the first VC to do a critical assembly.

I like that Valar is trying to move fast. It's true that you can't really learn much about your reactor until you have a commercially-relevant prototype, and they're trying to get to that point really fast. Respect for that. This little criticality experiment is more of a stunt though, for sure.

BTW TerraPower was a VC-backed nuclear startup splitting far more atoms, at high temperature and power, in the Advanced Test Reactor 5 years ago testing new fuel they designed themselves.