Why Trump Officials and VCs Love This Nuclear Power Startup’s Brute-Force Approach

On a cloudy day in late March, Isaiah Taylor, the 27-year-old founder and chief executive of Valar Atomics, a Hawthorne, Calif.–based nuclear energy startup, led me into a large black tent at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in the middle of the Utah desert. Dozens of construction workers and beeping forklifts buzzed around the nearly 40-foot-tall reactor rising from the center of the tent, with an enormous American flag in the background. Outside, Taylor gestured around to the empty...