The Trump administration’s favorite nuclear startup has ties to Russia and Epstein

At 26, Isaiah Taylor had accomplished more than most people do by the time they’re twice his age. The founder of Valar Atomics, a Southern California-based company that aims to make small-scale nuclear reactors, Taylor, a father of four, has government contracts, invitations to Mar-a-Lago, and investments from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley venture capital. His goal is nothing less than to usher the United States into an era of nuclear power domination — becoming the next Elon Musk while he’s at it. “We do not appreciate SpaceX enough,” he tweeted last year. “If it were not for a single highly motivated American startup, China would be preparing to simply own outer space. Now they’re playing catch-up. I plan to make Valar Atomics the equivalent for energy.”

The political winds appear to be at his back. “Unleashing nuclear energy is how we will power American artificial intelligence,” posted U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on X last year. “Nuclear energy provides the constant energy needed to power data centers and release the full potential of American innovation.” Last September, the DOE named Valar as one of four companies to participate in a pilot program to build nuclear fuel lines; two months later, the company became the first-ever venture-backed startup to reach the nuclear milestone of splitting atoms using its own reactor. “This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering — one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership,” Taylor said of the achievement in a press release. Max Ukropina, Valar Atomics’ Head of Projects, added, “America should be thrilled but wanting more.”

Taylor’s trajectory has been as unconventional as it is meteoric. The high-school dropout’s path to success included a controversial Christian nationalist church and an assist from a Russian-American power broker with ties to both the Kremlin and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — but practically no experience with nuclear energy. Nuclear experts have raised red flags about both the feasibility of Valar’s goals and its safety claims — but those concerns do not appear to faze Taylor, who went on the offense last year, entering Valar into a lawsuit against the U.S. government over what it considers a prohibitively restrictive interpretation of U.S. nuclear safety rules. As Taylor put it in a tweet last November, “Civilization is an inconceivably precious thing. But the way to keep it alive is by continually treating it as a frontier, not covering everything in bubble wrap.”

But those rules have not stopped the Trump administration from working with Valar — earlier this month, the U.S. government announced a partnership with the company to test its reactor for government use. “President Trump promised the American people that he would unleash American energy dominance,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright enthused about the partnership with Valar on X. “This is the next chapter for U.S. energy.”

Since the advent of nuclear energy in 1942, the field has been controversial, largely because of high-profile accidents such as the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Tight safety regulations make large-scale reactors expensive and cumbersome to build, and people don’t exactly jump at the chance to host one in their neighborhood.

Taylor founded Valar to address these barriers — smaller, more nimble reactors, he reasoned, would be both safer and more convenient. While the larger, traditional reactors typically produce enough power to fuel up to a million homes continuously, Taylor’s units are much more modest, big enough to power only about 5,000 homes.

Small-scale nuclear reactors like the ones that Taylor aims to build are not new — in fact, during the Cold War, both the United States and Russia used them to power satellites. Building them on land, however, has always proved prohibitively expensive; it’s much more cost-efficient to build one big reactor than a series of small ones, explains Nick Touran, a nuclear engineer who runs the informational site whatisnuclear.com. But that thinking is beginning to change: Small reactors could come in handy for AI data centers and also on remote military bases, where shipping fuel is both expensive and dangerous. In theory, small, portable reactors could act like batteries, powering a data center or a base for years without the need for more fuel.

The handful of nuclear experts I spoke with all acknowledged that small reactors would be desirable, but they weren’t sure Valar could manage to make them both cost-effective and scalable. “It’s not a new technology, but nobody’s been able to make it successful in electricity markets,” said Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission who currently heads the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She referred to Taylor and other nuclear startup founders as “nuke bros” who “don’t know what they don’t know.” Touran said he thought it was possible for Valar to make good progress on small reactors, but he had his doubts that they would succeed in making them profitable. “I think high risk, high reward,” he said. “It’s unlikely to be economically competitive, in my opinion.”

The long odds don’t seem to bother Taylor, who sees himself as fitting in the grand tradition of an old-fashioned rags-to-riches American story. In a 2024 post on X, Taylor described growing up poor in Kentucky and teaching himself to code on the family computer before he was even in high school. When he was 12, he wrote, his father promised to buy him a laptop if he would agree to pay his own way through college. Taylor took him up on the offer and proceeded to drop out of high school. By 16, he claimed that he was “making six figures.” By 17, he had moved with his family to Moscow, Idaho, where he started an auto-repair shop while living on his friend’s couch. “The business was deep in the red and barely hanging on,” he recalled in the post on X. But he persevered, and eventually the shop succeeded. “My software career did well too,” he wrote. “Life is more comfortable now, monetarily. I still work like a dog, but I don’t think about the next rent payment as much as I did.”

Small-town Idaho may seem like a strange place for an ambitious young coder, but he stayed there for a compelling reason. As Taylor explained on X in 2023, he lived in Moscow “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community.” That community was the fiefdom founded by Doug Wilson, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor of Moscow’s Christ Church. In a 2023 tweet, Taylor described Wilson as “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson said he first met a teenage Taylor when his family relocated to Moscow; Wilson described Taylor as “a go-getter.” Taylor didn’t respond to our request for comment on his relationship with Wilson and other details of this story.

Wilson has attracted widespread media attention for his controversial statements, including his remark to CNN last year that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” As I wrote in 2024:

He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.

While running the auto repair shop, coding, attending Wilson’s church, and starting a family, Taylor spent the next six years on “nights and weekends of research,” he told the tech publication Infinite Frontiers in 2024, he decided to tackle the problem of making nuclear power profitable — large reactors often scare off investors because they can cost billions to build and can take more than a decade to come online. Taylor says his interest in nuclear power runs in the family; his great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, worked on the Manhattan Project as a nuclear physicist. In 2023, Taylor founded Valar Atomics in the Southern California defense tech hub of El Segundo. Although Taylor hasn’t explained publicly why he chose the name, in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the Valar are angelic guardians who helped create the world and control nature.

In El Segundo’s macho scene of young, conservative Christian founders, Taylor fit right in. With his friend Augustus Doricko, founder of another buzzy El Segundo startup, the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, he began attending a nearby church in the denomination Wilson founded. On social media, Taylor sometimes posts scripture — for Christmas last year, a bible verse about the birth of Jesus appeared on the Valar house account, accompanied by a photo of its nuclear reactor prototypes wearing Santa hats.

In El Segundo, Taylor quickly scored connections to an exclusive network of high-powered tech investors. He secured a pre-seed round of $1.5 million from the firm Riot Ventures, and just over a year later, in 2025, he announced a seed round of $19 million, with funding from Silicon Valley power players such as investor and author Balaji Srinivasan. Later that year, he obtained a $130 million funding round.

And here is where the story departs from the more familiar tech entrepreneur-scores-a-big-win narrative, with an unusual Venn diagram of Taylor’s professional, religious, and personal interests converging on an unexpected protagonist. A co-leader of that round was Day One Ventures, a firm that says it aims to “back early-stage companies with customer obsession in their DNA.” Day One’s founder, visionary leader, and sole general partner is Masha Bucher, a one-time pro-Putin Russian political activist-turned Jeffery Epstein publicist-turned Silicon Valley kingmaker.

Before Bucher came to the United States in 2014, she still lived in Russia and was an enthusiastic supporter of Putin. There is a well-circulated 2009 photo of her as a teenager kissing Putin on the cheek; it became the subject of the 2011 documentary Putin’s Kiss. It’s unclear how she landed a gig doing publicity for convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 2017, but her name comes up several times in the recently released batch of files of Epstein’s communications. On one occasion in 2017, when she still had her original last name, Drokova, she asked Epstein to connect her with “adequate Russian oligarchs.” In 2018 Epstein wrote in an email to Bucher that her friend had “told me about the project she is doing researching a really bad guy that gets children for sex sent to his island … she almost fainted when I told her that person is me.” He asked her for nude photos of herself 11 days before he was arrested for the second time in 2019. Bucher, who did not respond to our request for comment, has claimed that she was never paid by Epstein for the work she did.

Bucher apparently already had some of those connections to wealthy Russians that she had asked Epstein to arrange — and in fact, she introduced Epstein to one of them. Her first boss in the world of tech venture capitalism was Serguei Beloussov, who later changed his name to Serg Bell. “Connecting you here,” she wrote to Epstein and Bell in 2018. “You both are one [sic] of the most intelligent and fun people I met in my life. Super smart and special.”

Bucher worked for Bell at two firms Bell had cofounded: Runa Capital and Acronis. In 2022, Bell was one of a handful of Russian expats living in the U.S. who were tracked by the U.S. government for allegedly attempting to export U.S. tech developments to Russia. The government did not find evidence of a security breach, but it did bar Acronis from sensitive government contracts last year. (Bell recently told the Washington Post that he never worked for Epstein, and that he advised others against doing business with him; he has also disavowed his Russian connections.)

According to reporting by the Washington Post, early fundraising materials for Day One Ventures show Bucher boasting of her connections to Russian billionaires Alexander Mamut and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, though she later denied writing the fundraising materials and has said she never took money from Russian oligarchs. She has said she left the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi in 2010, and she recently posted on X that was branded a traitor by Russian state media in 2017. “I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime,” she wrote. Yet sleuths on X have found evidence that those statements may not be true. Reporting by Russian-British investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh shows Bucher speaking at a pro-Putin event in 2019, years after she claimed to have disavowed him. According to records obtained by Pevchikh, she still holds a valid Russian passport, though she told the Washington Post in 2022, “I deeply regret ever joining Nashi and supporting Putin and his government.”

Bucher, who has also invested in Taylor’s friend Doricko’s company, seems to be more than just a funder for the companies she supports. A Day One pitch deck boasts that the firm is “actively involved in its portfolio companies and play a real, tangible role in helping them grow.” In an interview last year with TechCrunch, Bucher said her goal in founding the firm was to provide not only funding but also PR help to the companies she invested in. She also appears to enjoy a close relationship with Valar executives, posting photos of herself on social media attending parties with them. While Doricko cut ties with Bucher after the most recent Epstein disclosures, Taylor has done no such thing.

Bucher said that Taylor himself drew her to Valar. “I can’t think of a better founder,” she told TechCrunch. The decisions she would trust him with, she added, are “literally life-and-death.”

Not everyone is as bullish as Bucher about Valar’s prospects—nuclear experts have raised serious questions about the safety of the company’s technology and the qualifications of its leadership. In April 2025, Taylor boasted in a post on the Valar website that the company’s spent fuel was so safe that holding it in one’s bare hands for five minutes would result in a dose equivalent only to that of a CT scan. On X, Tuoran, the nuclear engineer, challenged the claim. “This statement cannot possibly be true,” he wrote. “Any nuclear reactor of the power you’re referring to makes spent fuel [that] would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful of spent fuel.” Another nuclear engineer, Gavin Ridley, chimed in with his own calculation: He found that Valar’s spent fuel would deliver a lethal dose in 85 milliseconds of direct contact. Taylor posted in response, “I will follow up with a detailed writeup tonight or tomorrow, back to back today. Should be fun …” He never did.

Although there are now some seasoned nuclear engineers in the company’s leadership, some of the top brass appear to have as little nuclear experience as Taylor. Kip Mock, a fellow member of Wilson’s Idaho church and a co-founder of Taylor’s auto repair shop, is now Valar’s head of operations. Another church member, Elijah Froh, serves as Valar’s director of business operations. (A story last year by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project revealed that Mock accidentally set Froh on fire in 2021 when he poured old diesel into a wood-burning stove and caused an explosion.)

Questions about safety apparently have not deterred Taylor, who appears to be as determined as ever to forge ahead. Last April, Valar announced it was joining several other companies and a handful of states in filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission over what they claim is an overly broad interpretation of safety regulations around testing nuclear reactors. In a post about the lawsuit, Taylor argued that the rules should allow Valar to test its reactor prototype, the Ward One. “Operating Ward One in a remote testing area within the United States would not pose a threat to the health and safety of the public or impact national security based on any reasonable accident scenario,” wrote Taylor. “However, because the NRC has failed to implement rules which would exempt this small test reactor from full NRC regulations, we are building and testing this reactor in the Philippines instead.” Mock, Taylor’s employee who accidentally set his buddy on fire in Idaho is heading the Philippines project. Taylor told Business Insider that the company planned to move “really fast” on it. Separately, last May, the state of Utah, a fellow plaintiff in the lawsuit, announced that it had won a “tight race” — through its Operation Gigawatt program aimed at attracting nuclear companies — with other states to host Valar’s first test reactor for the DOE.

The Trump administration is on board with nuclear, too. In an executive order last May, Trump vowed to have three test reactors up and running by July 4th of this year. In a recent interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Taylor called that goal “unbelievably exciting.” Last fall, the Trump administration quietly pushed through a suite of major changes to the laws that govern U.S. nuclear facilities. The new rules, which weren’t made public but were only shared with companies with government contracts, dramatically loosened requirements around safety, accidents, and environmental protections, according to reporting by NPR.

In his interview with Ryan, Taylor lavished praise on Trump and his administration. “You have to give President Trump credit for that in bringing this unbelievably talented, motivated group of people together,” he said. “Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.”

His enthusiasm turned out to be warranted. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that it had chosen Valar’s reactor for a contract with the Department of War and the Department of Energy. On February 15, the reactor was transported on a special flight from March Air Reserve in Riverside County, California, to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. “The successful delivery and installation of this reactor will unlock significant possibilities for the future of energy resilience and strategic independence for our nation’s defense,” a DOW press release stated. “This event is a testament to the ingenuity of the American spirit and a critical advancement in securing our nation’s freedom and strength for generations to come.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration’s favorite nuclear startup has ties to Russia and Epstein on Feb 28, 2026.