Startup Valar Atomics said on Monday that it had reached the critical level – a significant nuclear milestone – with the facilitate of one of the country’s best nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup last week announced secured a $130 million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar claims it is the first nuclear startup to trigger a critical fission reaction.
It is also, more specifically, the first company included in a special Department of Energy pilot program that aims to bring at least three startups to critical status by July 4 next year and announce that they have achieved that response. The pilot program, which followed an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in May, upended U.S. regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to quickly reach up-to-date milestones such as criticality.
“Zero power criticality is the first heartbeat of a reactor, proof that physics holds true,” Valar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. “This moment marks the beginning of a new era in U.S. nuclear engineering, defined by speed, scale and private sector execution with closer federal partnership.”
Criticality is the term used when a nuclear reactor sustains a chain reaction – which is the first step in providing energy. Enriched nuclear fuel releases neutrons that hit other atoms, which then decay; the neutrons produced in this process then hit other atoms and start the reaction again. This process is called fission. A properly functioning reactor has enough reactions to maintain the fission chain reaching a critical state.
“Think of a long chain of dominoes,” says Adam Stein, director of the nuclear innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, an ecomodernist policy center. “If the dominoes are spaced too far apart, the dominoes won’t hit the next ones. If they’re spaced the right way, then one hits the next, hits the next, and you get the reaction you’re hoping for.”
There is a difference between the type of criticality Valar achieved this week – so-called frosty criticality, or zero-power criticality – and what is needed to actually produce nuclear power. Nuclear reactors operate heat to create energy, but in the frosty criticality state, which is used to test the design and physics of the reactor, the reaction is not forceful enough to produce enough heat to produce energy.
The reactor that went critical this week is not actually a Valar model, but rather a combination of the startup’s fuel and technology with key design components provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of DOE’s research and development laboratories. The combined reactor is constructed using: separate fuel test was carried out last year in the laboratory, using fuel similar to that which will be used in the Valara reactor.