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Title: Valar Atomics Says It's the First Nuclear Startup To Achieve
Criticality

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/18/...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Startup Valar Atomics said on
Monday that it achieved criticality -- an essential nuclear milestone -- with
the help of one of the country's top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo,
California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130
million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam
Sankar, claims that it is the first nuclear startup to create a critical
fission reaction. It's also, more specifically, the first company in a
special Department of Energy pilot program aiming to get at least three
startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce it had achieved
this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive
order President Donald Trump signed in May, has upended US regulation of
nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones like criticality
at a rapid pace. There's a difference between the type of criticality Valar
reached this week -- what's known as cold criticality or zero-power
criticality -- and what's needed to actually create nuclear power. Nuclear
reactors use heat to create power, but in cold criticality, which is used to
test a reactor's design and physics, the reaction isn't strong enough to
create enough heat to make power. The reactor that reached criticality this
week is not actually Valar's own model, but rather a blend of the startup's
fuel and technology with key structural components provided by the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, one of the DOE's research and development laboratories.
The combination reactor builds off a separate fuel test performed last year
at the laboratory, using fuel similar to what Valar's reactor will use. "Zero
power criticality is a reactor's first heartbeat, proof the physics holds,"
Valar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. "This moment marks the dawn
of a new era in American nuclear engineering, one defined by speed, scale,
and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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