Claims: the technology page says Valar designed and built its test reactor 'in record time'; the Series B post says it took seven months to take Ward 250 critical; Taylor told DOE the site was empty nine months before criticality (orig-010); the June 2026 draft counts 'only 9 months' from groundbreaking to power. Record: Valar's own safety and QA papers say Ward 250 incorporates Ward Zero hardware (orig-059), and Ward Zero took about ten months to design and build, by Taylor's account to TechCrunch, before its February 2025 completion (orig-005), seven months before the Utah groundbreaking. The core physics was tested in Nevada in November 2025 on a Los Alamos machine (orig-008), and the Series B post itself says the NOVA core took two years. The short timelines hold as worded for the Utah site and for the step from the Nevada core test to Utah criticality (seven months, November 2025 to June 2026; orig-015), but the reactor was the product of roughly two years of earlier work in California and Nevada.

• Technology | Valar Atomics (Valar Atomics) primary company “We designed and built our advanced test reactor in record time.”
• Announcing our $1B Series B Led By Sequoia (Isaiah Taylor) (Valar Atomics, 2026-08-04) primary company “It took seven months to take Ward 250 critical.”
• Valar Atomics comes out of stealth with $19M and a pilot reactor site (Mike Butcher) (TechCrunch, 2025-02-20) news “constructed our thermal test unit in a period of about 10 months”
• Ward 250 By the Numbers (unlisted draft page) (Valar Atomics, 2026-06-28) primary company “we broke ground on this test site in September of last year”