Home Valar Atomics said Monday that it reached criticality, an essential nuclear milestone, with the help of one of the country’s main nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced It had raised a $130 million funding round backed by Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, and claims to be the first nuclear startup to create a critical fission reaction.
It is also, more specifically, the first company in a special Department of Energy pilot program that aims to get at least three startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce that it had achieved this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in May, has changed US regulation on new nuclear companies, allowing companies to reach new milestones such as criticality at a rapid pace.
“Zero energy criticality is the first heartbeat of a reactor, proof that the physics are valid,” Valar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. “This moment marks the beginning of a new era in American nuclear engineering, defined by speed, scale and private sector execution with closer federal partnership.”
Criticality is the term used when a nuclear reactor is maintaining a chain reaction, the first step in providing energy. The enriched nuclear fuel releases neutrons, which collide with other atoms, which then split; The neutrons from that process then hit other atoms and start the reaction again. This process is known as fission. A reactor that works correctly has enough reactions to keep that fission chain going, reaching a state of criticality.
“Think of a long chain of dominoes,” says Adam Stein, director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, an ecomodernist policy center. “If you have those dominoes spaced too far apart, one domino won’t hit the next. If they’re spaced correctly, then one hits the next, hits the next, and you get the reaction you expect.”
There is a difference between the type of criticality Valar reached this week (what is known as cold criticality or zero energy criticality) and what is needed to create nuclear power. Nuclear reactors use heat to generate power, but in cold criticality, which is used to test the design and physics of a reactor, the reaction is not strong enough to generate enough heat to generate power.
The startup says the assembly that reached criticality this week is the NOVA core built by Valar with a combination of the startup’s fuel and technology with key structural components provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the DOE’s research and development laboratories. The combined reactor is based on a separate fuel test carried out last year in the laboratory, using fuel similar to that which the Valar reactor will use.
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