In short: The article's most-favoured private: raised $1 billion earlier this month at a $6 billion valuation, reached criticality this year, and is Segra's position. Hyde's specific case is the answer to his own objection — "Valar can deploy at least 30 small or midsize reactors at one site, overcoming some of the efficiency problems associated with deploying a single small reactor in a remote spot" — plus gas-cooled technology whose waste heat "can power industrial processes," widening the addressable market beyond electricity.
Valar is the most richly funded of the group — it raised $1 billion this month at a $6 billion valuation — and it is the one the article's investor voice, Segra's Arthur Hyde, argues for most specifically.
His reasoning is the interesting part, because it answers his own objection. Hyde's main criticism of microreactors is that a reactor must be guarded around the clock no matter how small it is, so putting one tiny reactor in a remote place means paying a large fixed security bill for a small amount of power — "almost impossible to have that economically make sense." Valar's approach is to stop fighting that arithmetic and dilute it instead: put at least 30 reactors on a single site, so one perimeter, one set of guards and one permitting process cover thirty machines.
Its reactors are also gas-cooled and run hot, so besides electricity they give off usable industrial heat — meaning it can sell to factories and process plants, not only to power buyers. Set against all of that: it is private, has no commercial licence, was not one of the Army's five, and its $6 billion price already assumes a great deal goes right. It did reach criticality this year, which is the one piece of hard technical evidence in its favour.
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