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An advanced nuclear startup just achieved a milestone as it races to meet an ambitious Department of Energy goal.
Founded just over two years ago in July 2023, El Segundo-based Valar Atomics announced it had achieved what is known as “cold criticality” during a November test at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the New Mexico site best known for its role in the Manhattan Project.
Cold criticality occurs when uranium-235, the isotope used as nuclear fuel, achieves a self-sustaining reaction, but without reaching full operational temperature or producing power, according to Valar. Valar used a special fuel that was originally made by General Atomics and sourced through the DOE, and equipment from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Valar contributed the reactor core and general configuration, which was meant to mimic the design of its Ward 250 reactor, but at a smaller scale.
Valar Atomics CEO and founder Isaiah Taylor says the benchmark is a crucial step for data gathering as the company pushes toward the bigger goal of achieving criticality (that actually produces power) in a full-scale test reactor.
“All of these things give us a ton of data that we can then go use and make sure that we understand our full scale Ward 250 core before we go take that critical and actually make some power in it next year,” Taylor says.
Following the achievement on Monday, Taylor took to social media platform X to trumpet that Valar “became the first startup in history to split the atom,” and doubled down in a press release, saying Valar secured “the first criticality ever achieved by a venture-backed company.”
The exuberant announcement sparked some backlash online, including from nuclear consultant Nick Touran, who has a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan.
“Having the institutional capability to relatively quickly get first in line at the Los Alamos critical facility and get some of your stuff in there and test it, I think that’s impressive,” Touran says. “But they certainly are not the first startup to split the atom.”
Touran also runs the educational resource whatisnuclear.com, and spent 15 years at Bill Gates-backed TerraPower. He noted that TerraPower already tested fuel in a test reactor that splits atoms at a high rate. TerraPower did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.
In a conversation with Inc., Taylor narrowed the scope of his claim, saying that what Valar was the first to do was achieve zero-power criticality using a startup-built reactor core.
“Other startups have built fuel and have tested fuel in other reactors, but no startup has ever built a core and taken a core critical,” Taylor says.
Touron also notes that cold criticality experiments are no longer quite so common, given advancements in computing that render cold criticals effectively unnecessary: “Our computer simulations can predict what a cold critical test tells you.” But Taylor pushed back, arguing that nuclear engineering tends “to massively overweight our mathematical models” and that real world, precise data is still crucial.
The news follows the August kickoff of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program. Valar’s project was one of 11 advanced nuclear projects from 10 different companies (two projects from Oklo were chosen) selected by the DOE in an effort to construct, operate and achieve test reactor criticality in at least three reactors by July 4, 2026.
The Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act created incentives for nuclear power, as well as allocating funding toward a domestic supply chain for fuel production and infrastructure improvements at labs like Los Alamos. The bipartisan ADVANCE Act, passed in 2024, also kicked off reforms within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission meant to accelerate licensing. The Trump administration’s program, Touran notes, is building on that progress by opening up resources and streamlining regulation for these startups in an effort to accelerate innovation: “They basically are asking the nuclear industry to throw down and actually build stuff.”
Nuances of Valar’s milestone aside, Touran adds there is value from an innovation standpoint in having more companies participate more quickly in such experiments. The ultimate prize, however, is still a ways off.
“I think we’ll see a bunch of people doing relatively simple criticality experiments, and that’s better than nothing. Even if they all go critical, none of them are anywhere near having an economical, reliable power plant,” Touran says. “But everybody’s excited to get going and see if all this talk actually means anything.”
As for Valar, a lot has to happen between now and the July 2026 goalpost for taking its test reactor critical. Taylor says the company already has a version of its high-temperature gas reactor built at a facility in Los Angeles, but still has to build up the Utah test facility where it broke ground in September. Valar is one of a number of companies working to develop small modular reactors (SMRs), which are meant to be less expensive and faster to build than today’s larger scale reactors.
“It is much easier to achieve a zero power criticality than to actually make power in a reactor. There’s a huge technical gap between those things,” Taylor says. “But I certainly wouldn’t underestimate the value of the data that we’re going to get out of this test.”
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Chloe Aiello
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