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Companies that develop nuclear reactors have raised small units (SMRS) more than $ 1.5 billion in the past year, as technology companies decided to hunger to obtain power to train artificial intelligence models and governments to adhere to the industry.
For example, X-Energy A collection of $ 700 million This month, based in Paris Newco 151 million dollars raised Last year, one of them will be limited to not mentioning $ 700 million invested in OKLO, Nuscale and Nano Nuclear for similar projects in the United States
While nuclear fusion still looks relatively far away, SMRS is a warm atomic property today. So it is important to start the SMR Valar Atomics It raised $ 19 million in the seed financing round to develop the first test reactor. Leading funding from Riot Ventures, with Alleycorp, prepared capital, first daytime projects and participating solid atlas.
The SMR technology in Valar depends on a high gas reactor. This will be built from a nuclear equivalent for “Gigafactory” (where the batteries are built), except for Vallar called “Gigasites”. By creating a SMRS actually production line, Valar hopes to reduce the costs that are largely associated with building nuclear reactors, which are usually custom projects.
The co -founder and CEO of Valar, Isaia Taylor, told Techcrunch that the restriction of construction reactors is not as it is published. He hopes that the Valar approach from “Gigafactory” will be able to fix this through “industrial” instead of “craftsman”.
The company plans to build hundreds of SMRS in locations outside the network mostly to data centers and industrial factories. It has a preliminary contract with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute to build a reactor in the country. Under the contract, Valar plans to try a test scale, and build broad -rang reactions before the first integrated reactor appears online.
He said: “We will make the first one, the second, and the third, which will develop organically into a factory.”
Valar basic technology uses helium gas to reach temperatures of up to 900 ° C – three times of traditional nuclear reactors. This means that Valar can produce hydrogen efficiently and integrate it with broken carbon dioxide to create low -carbon artificial fuel for vehicles and infrastructure.
“If you can get a hot nuclear reactor, you can produce hydrogen at a very low price, and lock all kinds of things. One of these things is artificial fuel. We want to be able to make this process cheap and make the reactors cheap, too.”
“We designed, engineered and included the thermal test unit in a period of about 10 months. This is possible – after all, the first nuclear reactor was built eight months, in 1943.”
Taylor, who was his grandfather, by chance, a nuclear physicist in the Manhattan project, left high school at the age of 16, and continued to study software systems as well as startups. The company’s technical efforts are led by nuclear officials, Mark Mitchell (Former President of Modular Reactor Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC), leader of the first small unit reactor project in the world at the Pebble BED reactor in South Africa). The startup team also has many USNC people, including the head of mechanical engineering, and William Van Roen.
While the company’s plans are ambitious, there appears to be the rear winds of such nuclear projects. US Law of reducing inflation It opened the private investment in the clean energy infrastructure, while China is also Investing $ 440 billion In new nuclear plants. plus, 14 of the largest banks in the world She expressed her support for triple nuclear energy by 2050.