A dormant Department of Energy legal authority, originally created for testing nuclear reactors, was activated by a 2025 executive order (EO14301) to let Valar's reactor go critical on American soil, bypassing the NRC's slow commercial-licensing track.

10:04do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D." Uh, and that's exactly what the Trump administration has done. So, the reactor that's uh behind us here um was turned on under an executive order. It was EO14301, which called for three advanced reactors to go critical on American soil by July

10:294th. Um and and we built it under Department of Energy uh authority under that executive order. So, I mean, this is an incredibly exciting time in nuclear. This is really breaking that chicken and egg, right? It's the first time where we've been able to to shortcut that, you know, problem of how do you get data and uh and we have data now. We're currently, as we're sitting

10:50here, making 100 kow uh splitting something like 10 to the 17 atoms per second uh in this reactor behind us. So, this is the control room. There's two sections. This is the uh control half. This door's closed. We have to have senior reactor operators permission to enter here, which we just got. Thank you, Brent. And uh out here is sort of our uh observation room. >> It looks like the control room in

11:13Hawthorne. >> It's it is the exact control room in Hawthorne. We literally picked this up, put it on an airplane, and flew it here. So the entirety of the plant, including a control room, flew with us on the C17s. Uh first time that's ever been done, which is pretty cool. >> How many people um operate? >> We got one one operator at the controls who's the reactor operator who's

11:32controlling all this. And then you got an senior reactor operator who provides oversight and kind of ensures that we're staying within our safety limits and stuff, but we always have to have one person that controls maintaining safety, maintaining the reactor. >> So, in a couple of days here, we're going to do a scram. So, we're going to press that big red button right there. Uh big red button scrams the reactor.

11:55So, basically drops the rods, right? Dropping the control rods will introduce a lot of boron carbide into the core. When we scram that, rods will drop. Boron carbide enters the core. Boron is a strong neutron absorber and so there will not be enough neutrons to maintain criticality because the neutron population gets absorbed into the into the rods. So that'll cause the reaction to stop. Now in a nuclear reactor, this