Announcing Valar Atomics' $1B series B led by Sequoia, with Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, Point72, Conviction, and others. Alongside the $1B equity, we have closed a $200m credit facility led by Erebor and JPM. I'm excited to welcome Shaun Maguire from Sequoia to our board.

Very special piece. Over the last few years I have gotten to know a very small handful of investors who don’t feel like investors at all—insatiably curious, addicted to winning, and yet still humble. Sarah is one of them, and Dom managed to capture it

Tonight at 4pm PT, Valar Atomics will initiate a SCRAM and subsequently a Loss of Forced Cooling event on the Ward 250 plant. This will be our most important safety demonstration to date, showcasing how far advanced nuclear has come in fundamental safety. Loss of cooling has always been the central challenge behind some of the most serious historical reactor incidents; it’s what caused the meltdowns in both Fukushima and Three Mile Island. After a reactor shuts down, the recently split atoms continue to give off heat as they work down their decay chains, causing temperatures to rise in the core. In traditional reactors, this means that it is necessary to continue running the cooling pumps for several days after a shutdown. In the case of both TMI and Fukushima, forced cooling of the core failed, causing meltdown. So why are we going to initiate a Loss of Forced Cooling event tonight? Because the Ward series of reactors are fundamentally different from the reactors of prior generations. We designed this reactor to be inherently and intrinsically safe, also called “walk-away” safe. Tonight, we’re going to demonstrate that. After commanding a SCRAM of the reactor, our Senior Reactor Operator (SRO) will command the reactor operator to shut down the main circulator, turning off forced cooling. But the SRO will not stop there—we are going to simulate total electrical failure of the plant. In addition to shutdown of the coolant loop, we will shut down the chiller, the RCCS pump, and both building and nuclear HVAC systems. This will leave the reactor without any active cooling of any kind, giving us a complete demonstration of the passive safety of this architecture. Over the next 24 hours, we will see the decay heat in the core safety distribute through the system and leave through the RCCS via passive circulation. We are not going in to this blind. We did this test in Hawthorne late last year at much higher temperatures and with a simulated decay heat input more than 100x higher than we’ll be demonstrating today. But tonight, we’ll be doing it with real nuclear decay heat. Join us live at 4pm PT / 7pm ET on the Valar Atomics X account!

Moments ago, Valar Atomics took Ward 250 critical for the first time. This fulfills President Trump’s EO 14301, which called for 3 advanced reactors to go critical by July 4th. This is our second criticality as a company, and an important step toward our goal of power by July 4.