US startup Valar Atomics demonstrates a functioning nuclear reactor

Valar Atomics powered an AI chip using nuclear power. According to its own information, the company is the first of the nuclear startups to produce electricity.

Valar Atomics has demonstrated the operation of its reactor, called Ward 250. A Blackwell chip from Nvidia was powered by the electricity. “This is the first meeting of advanced nuclear technology and AI – two technologies that will transform the next century,” Valar Atomics wrote in a post on Linkedin.

Valar Atomics has also announced a partnership with Nvidia: Both want to work together on AI systems that run on nuclear power. This was only possible by combining two systems that did not require water, wrote Valar Atomics: “Electricity generation without water and AI cooling without water”.

Valar relies on a high-temperature reactor

Ward 250 is a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) operating on tristructural-isotropic (TRISO) fuel. It consists of small spheres inside which there is highly low-enriched uranium (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, HALEU). The reactor operates at a temperature of 750 degrees Celsius and is cooled with helium gas.

The five-megawatt reactor was built in California, dismantled into eight modules and transported by the US Air Force to Utah in February this year, where it was reassembled. The demonstration also took place there. The reactor recently reached criticality for the first time.

Valar is one of almost a dozen start-ups in the USA that are working on nuclear power. The controversial form of energy is currently experiencing a renaissance with the boom in artificial intelligence (AI): the necessary data centers, which are currently being built in large numbers, require a lot of electricity. Large corporations such as Google, Meta and Microsoft have therefore secured the capacity of nuclear power plants that are to be put back into operation or newly built.

(wpl)