分类： business

Three-year-old California-based microreactor developer Valar Atomics has closed a landmark $1 billion Series B funding round, backed by growing investor optimism that upcoming reforms to U.S. nuclear regulations will unlock the first large-scale expansion of American nuclear power generation in more than 50 years. Headquartered in Torrance, the startup announced this week that the round was led by top-tier venture capital firm Sequoia, with proceeds earmarked to prepare the 5-megawatt Ward 250 reactor — a helium-cooled design that deviates from traditional water-cooled nuclear technology — for full commercial launch. As of the announcement, the innovative reactor design has not yet received regulatory approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Valar founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor framed the new capital injection as a critical turning point for the company in a post on the firm’s official website. “This has been Valar’s mission since its inception: to transition from demonstrating the operability of an integrated reactor system to producing fleets of them en masse,” Taylor wrote, noting the funding enables the next critical stage of the company’s development.

Valar’s journey to this $1 billion milestone has been anything but conventional. Once a target of industry derision for bold social media claims made by its 27-year-old founder during a lawsuit against the NRC, the startup’s patriotic framing and high-energy showmanship quickly caught the attention of Republican officials, eventually earning it the label of “the Trump administration’s favorite nuclear startup” from investigative outlet Mother Jones. The startup has leveraged its close ties to the current administration to secure key access to federal programs and national lab resources over the past two years.

The company’s rapid progress unfolded across 2024 and 2025, with a string of industry firsts. In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy selected Valar as one of just 10 companies to join a new pilot program designed to support next-generation nuclear startups in completing their first controlled fission reactions. A month later, the agency tapped Valar as one of four participants in a separate initiative to build out new domestic nuclear fuel supply chains. Just two months after that selection, Valar made history as the first venture-backed nuclear startup to complete fission using an experimental core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In early 2025, Valar notched another first: the company loaded all components of its Ward 250 prototype onto a C-17 Globemaster III military transport aircraft at California’s March Air Reserve Base and flew the full unit to Utah’s Hill Air Force Base. The airlift, hailed as “groundbreaking” by the Trump administration, served as the first real-world demonstration that a complete microreactor could be transported via air, a key logistical advantage for remote or distributed deployment. By June 2025, Valar had completed fission with its full Ward 250 prototype, becoming the second participant in the DOE’s pilot program to hit that milestone.

In its announcement this week, Valar confirmed the new funding will support a fully vertically integrated, hardware-first operational strategy, covering every stage of the business from reactor deployment and long-term site operations to in-house nuclear fuel production. Despite this rapid progress and investor confidence, the company still faces substantial technical, regulatory, and market hurdles to bring its technology to mass market.

High-temperature gas-cooled reactors, the category Valar’s helium-cooled design falls into, have a checkered history in the U.S. The only U.S. commercial facility of this type, Colorado’s Fort St. Vrain nuclear station, operated from the 1970s before shutting down after a decade of costly maintenance problems and unplanned outages, eventually being replaced by a natural gas power plant. While a small number of similar reactors have been built globally, most have only ever operated as experimental test units.

China has emerged as the global frontrunner in commercializing this technology in recent years, accelerating a global race to deploy helium-cooled reactors that offer a key advantage: they do not require large volumes of water for cooling, eliminating a major vulnerability for water-constrained regions and utilities facing drought-related generation cuts amid climate change. Beijing began construction on its first large-scale high-temperature gas-cooled reactor in 2012, achieved first fission in 2021, and connected the 150-megawatt unit to the national grid to sell commercial power in December 2023. Two years later, China launched a national industrial alliance to speed up development of the technology, and broke ground on a second larger reactor with four times the capacity of the first unit in early 2026.

For the U.S. industry, the benefits of helium-cooled designs have been thrown into sharp relief recently, as record-breaking heat waves across Europe have forced water-cooled inland nuclear plants to reduce output to avoid raising river water temperatures to dangerous levels. Even with this clear strategic advantage, however, developers of small modular reactors (defined as units producing less than 300 megawatts) and microreactors (units under 20 megawatts) still need to prove their business model is economically viable. For decades, nuclear plant operators have generated profits by building large, high-output facilities, not scaling production of large fleets of smaller units.

Valar’s plan to manufacture its own TRISO fuel, a specialized complex fuel form required for its reactor design, adds another layer of challenge. Currently, only a handful of domestic suppliers are working to scale up TRISO production in the U.S., creating potential supply chain bottlenecks for the startup.

Beyond technical and economic hurdles, Valar also faces intense competition from well-funded established players in the advanced nuclear space. Kairos Power, which broke ground on its first commercial plant in Tennessee earlier this year, counts backing from Google’s parent company Alphabet. X-energy, which secured a key NRC approval for its first project in May 2025, counts retail and tech giant Amazon as an equity stakeholder. Unlike Valar, neither competitor is closely aligned with a particular political party, a difference that could have strategic implications.

Valar’s close ties to the Trump administration, which have been a major advantage in securing access and support today, could become a significant liability if Democrats regain the White House and control of Congress in future elections. Already, former President Trump’s close personal ties to the nuclear industry are facing growing scrutiny from watchdogs and lawmakers, and Valar’s latest fundraising round is likely to amplify that attention. The Sequoia partner who led the Series B round, Shaun Maguire, is a prominent public supporter of Trump who became a center of controversy last year over widely condemned bigoted remarks targeting Muslims. As part of the funding deal, Maguire will take a seat on Valar’s board of directors.

This article was originally published by Canary Media under a Creative Commons license, with reporting from award-winning energy and climate journalist Alexander C. Kaufman.

Seventeen years after joining SpaceX as an early engineer, Andre Lavoie is preparing to unlock one of the most lucrative payoffs in modern corporate history. Hired back in 2009 when the private space firm was still a risky startup, Lavoie helped design the pressure tanks that power SpaceX’s iconic rockets, and took part of his compensation in company stock — a common incentive used by early-stage ventures to attract talent when cash reserves are tight. Today, that 200,000-share grant is valued at roughly $23 million (£17 million), and the 63-year-old veteran says he plans to begin selling small tranches of his holdings as soon as they become available.

“Every chance I get going forward, I’ll sell a little bit more,” Lavoie told the BBC in an interview. “The shares have been going up so radically it keeps messing up my life plans – you really can’t know the future, so it’s better to sell early and in intervals.” Lavoie is far from alone in his windfall: following SpaceX’s landmark June IPO on the Nasdaq, the largest initial public offering in global history that valued the rocket and satellite manufacturer at more than $2 trillion, founder Elon Musk confirmed that the listing had turned an estimated “several thousand” employees into millionaires — including frontline production line staff. Independent reports put the number of new millionaires created by the IPO at roughly 4,400.

Unlike standard public listings that release all eligible insider shares for trading at once, SpaceX has structured its share unlock in staggered batches. The first 20% of locked shares became available for trading on August 6, with additional batches rolling out through the remainder of 2026. The staggered release gives early shareholders full flexibility over their exit strategy: while Lavoie has opted for gradual selling to lock in gains, other long-term employees have chosen to hold their entire stakes in hopes of larger long-term returns.

The June IPO briefly pushed Elon Musk past the milestone of becoming the world’s first trillionaire, though a subsequent cool-down in the stock price pulled his net worth back below the trillion-dollar mark within a matter of weeks. When SpaceX released its first quarterly earnings as a public company this week, the results laid bare the firm’s aggressive growth strategy: quarterly revenue nearly doubled year-over-year to hit $7.8 billion (£5.8 billion), but capital spending ballooned to $18.3 billion — more than six times the amount spent in the same period a year earlier. The company posted a net loss of $143 million for the three months ending in June, and a cumulative loss of $2 billion for the first half of 2026.

The large loss and massive spending on artificial intelligence development spooked investors, pushing SpaceX shares lower in trading following the earnings release. On a post-earnings investor call, Musk pushed back against critics, arguing that markets are underestimating the long-term potential of the company’s Starlink satellite internet division — the only segment of SpaceX currently turning a profit. Musk predicted that Starlink could eventually deliver the majority of global internet connectivity.

Debate among industry analysts over SpaceX’s current valuation remains deeply split. Some Wall Street analysts have argued that the company’s current market value is inflated by hype around its ties to Musk’s AI venture xAI, echoing broader concerns that AI-linked firms from SpaceX to OpenAI and Anthropic carry overly stretched valuations. Some analysts estimate SpaceX’s fair value is less than half its current public market price, while Sinead O’Sullivan, a former NASA economist, told the BBC in June that she views SpaceX as largely an “Elon Musk ego project,” arguing that investors are buying into the Musk brand more than the underlying space industry business.

Other aerospace analysts argue that the recent share price volatility has far more to do with broader macroeconomic market trends than fundamental shifts at SpaceX. Ron Epstein, aerospace analyst at Bank of America Securities, noted that investors who write off SpaceX purely as an AI play are misjudging the company’s core impact. “They’re not just a compute provider. They’re not just an AI company. It’s a far more complicated picture than that,” Epstein explained. He pointed out that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has cut the cost of launching payloads to orbit from $10,000-$20,000 per kilogram to roughly $2,000, transforming access to space: “they have built a railroad to space.”

For his part, Lavoie remains bullish on SpaceX’s long-term prospects even as he cashes out part of his stake. Lavoie says the proceeds from his share sales will fund two personal projects: a hotel he is renovating in Pontebba, located in Italy’s northeastern Friuli region, and a small local brewery. His top priority for the future, he says, is partnering with a local environmental organization to raise public awareness of air pollution in the area.

Looking back on his early days at the company, Lavoie recalled that he interviewed directly with Elon Musk before being hired. “He’s a very charming person when he wants something,” Lavoie said. He declined to comment on Musk’s public political stances, noting “that’s his business,” but he offered unreserved praise for SpaceX and its team: “I’ve always been happily supportive and impressed, and would work hard with those incredible people again.” Even as he locks in his early windfall, Lavoie maintains that “The solid business model of SpaceX will prove itself to be worth the investment.”

American consumers are currently facing sticker shock at the meat counter, with nationwide retail beef prices surging 12% year-over-year – more than triple the general rate of inflation. But while this dramatic price spike has pushed costs to all-time highs, a deep dive into the U.S. beef supply chain by the BBC World Service’s *Follow the Money* investigative series reveals a surprising reality: no player along the chain is walking away with extra profit.

South Dakota-based cattle rancher Eric Gropper embodies this paradox. Operating roughly 350 breeding cows across 8,000 acres of leased grassland on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Gropper sells his young calves at annual livestock auctions, where he is currently seeing the highest bids in his decades of farming: a 600-pound calf now sells for around $2,500, up from $2,000 just two years ago. This pricing boom stems from a historic nationwide cattle shortage: driven by widespread drought across major cattle-producing states and persistent disease pressures, the total U.S. cattle population at the start of 2026 dropped to its lowest level since 1951, with more than 60% of all grazing land impacted by severe dry conditions.

For Gropper, that record sale price has been entirely erased by skyrocketing operating costs. Thirteen natural wells that once supplied groundwater for his herd have run dry amid the ongoing drought, forcing him to pay for regular water tanker deliveries. The post-pandemic inflation surge has pushed up the cost of every essential input: a new pickup truck that once retailed for $40,000 now costs $100,000; a single wooden fence post has jumped from $6 to $19; and a quarter-mile roll of barbed wire has more than doubled from $60 to $130. With parched pastures producing too little grass to feed his cattle, he also must purchase costly supplemental hay and silage.

“I’m able to pay my bills, but my input costs are so drastically high that if we didn’t have these record prices we’d all be broke,” Gropper explained. “When I sit down to do my taxes, it looks like I made a lot of money on paper. But when all is said and done, I really haven’t made any more than I usually do.”

After Gropper sells his six-month-old calves, they move to the next link in the supply chain: commercial feedlots, where 95% of U.S. cattle are fattened on grain for three to six months before slaughter, with the largest facilities housing more than 100,000 cattle at a time. Agricultural economics professor Brenda Boetel of the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, who closely tracks the feedlot sector, notes that the same paradox applies here: while feedlots sell finished cattle at record prices, they are also forced to purchase young calves at all-time market highs, leaving no room for expanded profits.

The next step in the chain is meat processing, a sector dominated by extreme market concentration: just four multinational firms – Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef – control roughly 85% of U.S. beef processing, a level of consolidation that has drawn widespread accusations of price-fixing, even from former President Donald Trump. Given this market power, many consumers assume the big packers are reaping massive windfalls from high retail beef prices – but current data tells a very different story.

Tyson Foods, the largest U.S. meat processor, reported a more than $500 million loss in its beef division in the first half of its 2026 fiscal year. For small independent processors like Jamie Crumley, owner of Harpley’s Meatpacking in central North Carolina, the squeeze is even more acute. Crumley says the cost of live cattle has jumped as much as 60% over the past three years, and while processors can raise wholesale prices, there is a hard ceiling on how high they can go: consumers will simply switch to cheaper protein alternatives like chicken or imported beef if prices get too steep.

Compounding the issue, the national cattle shortage has forced processing plants to operate well below full capacity. Harpley’s is built to process 425 to 450 cattle per day, but currently only handles 350 head daily due to limited supply. Fixed costs for facilities, equipment, and staff remain the same regardless of output, meaning those costs are spread across far fewer animals. Crumley says she can lose anywhere from $100 to $400 per head of cattle on any given day, a dynamic that directly explains the major meatpacking giants’ large losses.

At the final end of the supply chain are restaurants and retailers, who also face the same profit squeeze. Paul Urban, co-owner of Block 16, a popular burger restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska that serves 2,800 burgers monthly, says the menu price of a burger has risen from $8.95 when the restaurant opened in 2010 to $11.95 today – but even with that increase, sky-high ground beef costs have kept profits flat. If the pair raised prices enough to actually grow their margin, a burger would cost $13, a price point they say customers will not accept.

“We don’t make the profit that we’d like, but you’re still getting people through the door, and it’s not always about the money,” Urban said.

Across the entire supply chain, the dynamic is consistent: every player is processing more revenue than before, but none are retaining the extra margin. Industry observers agree this situation will not reverse until the U.S. cattle population grows enough to ease the current shortage. But as Gropper points out, expanding cattle supply is not a quick fix: a young heifer requires two years to reach breeding age and produce her first calf, and that calf needs another year to reach slaughter weight, meaning it will take roughly three years for additional supply to reach the market.