New financing round benefits Valar
Hawthorne, Calif.–based reactor start-up Valar Atomics recently announced that it has raised $130 million in its Series A funding round, led by venture capital groups Snowpoint, Day One, and Dream.
The company also announced that Doug Philippone, cofounder of Snowpoint, is joining Valar’s board of directors.
The details: With more than $150 million in total funding, Valar is working toward the deployment of its 100-kWt Ward 250, a helium-cooled, TRISO-fueled, high-temperature gas reactor.
The company is pursuing two major projects to deploy its flagship reactor. The first, dubbed Ward One, is slated to be built in the Philippines under the direction of the Valar Atomics Research Institute, a subsidiary of Valar incorporated in the country.
Valar chose to pursue deployment in the Philippines in part to avoid U.S. regulatory burdens. To that end, the company is also involved in the State of Texas et al. v. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a lawsuit that challenges the NRC’s ability to license SMRs and microreactors.
Valar is also pursuing a domestic project in Utah through the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program. The company broke ground in September at Utah San Rafael Energy Lab on its U.S. Ward 250 site.
Also in September, Valar was selected alongside four other companies for the DOE’s Fuel Line Pilot Program. Under this program, Valar plans to “support TRISO fuel fabrication for the Ward 250 reactor deployment and potentially other high-temperature gas reactors.”
The timeline: Of the 10 companies selected for the Reactor Pilot Program, Valar is one of only three that has broken ground on its associated project. First out of the gate was Aalo Atomics in August, which started construction at Idaho National Laboratory. Valar came next and was followed by Oklo shortly after, which also broke ground at INL.
The DOE has set a goal of July 4, 2026, for reactors in the program to enter operation. In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Valar founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor affirmed that the company is still on track to meet that goal.
When asked if he believed his company would be the first in the U.S. to bring an SMR on line, Taylor said, “It’s a hot race, and there are a lot of people working on the problem, but where I sit today, I do believe that Valar Atomics will be the first. That is absolutely our goal.”
