10/02/2026
I was aware of Valar Atomics and its Emery County project. I monitored it as an investment when Palantir, a defense contractor, invested.
However, when Grok, Elon Musk's A.I. offered this analysis, I must come forward and disagree with Price and Wellington being used as a large, potentially very dangerous, experiment!
GROK: The company is Valar Atomics, founded in 2023 by Isaiah Taylor, a 27 year-old high school dropout with no formal nuclear training, though his great-grandfather was a Manhattan Project physicist.
On leadership: Taylor's a self-taught coder who ran a failed auto-repair software company before this. The technical credibility comes from his team — chief nuclear officer Mark Mitchell, former president of Ultra Safe Nuclear, and Muhammad Shahzad, ex-president and CFO of Relativity Space. Sequoia led their billion-dollar Series B in August at a six-billion valuation, with Palmer Luckey and Palantir's CTO also invested.
On solvency: they're not broke, but they're not solvent in the traditional sense either. Zero commercial revenue — the Ward 250 reactor in Emery County only produces a hundred kilowatts, enough to power one Nvidia chip in a demo. Their June financials show about a hundred and thirteen million in current assets against an eighty-three million accumulated deficit, and the billion-dollar round is what keeps them alive. The real risk isn't cash today — it's that the entire business model depends on scaling from one test reactor to four hundred fifty-six units at their Project Beehive site near Price, which is still just a BLM application under review.
One thing worth flagging: Their Utah footprint is Emery County for the test reactor, and Carbon County near Price for the big data center campus.