Nuclear Startup Wins Local Approval For Up To 120 Small Reactors Beside Data Centers

Carbon County planners approved nuclear startup Valar Atomics’ permit Thursday night for a campus of small reactors and data centers in eastern Utah.

The county’s planning commission backed the permit at a special meeting in Price, Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. Planning Commissioner Lisa Simmons cast the only no vote.

Valar’s application calls for between 40 and 120 reactors on about 640 acres of state trust land near Wellington. The company calls it the Raceway Energy Campus.

Valar can’t build reactors there until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses them, under the permit’s conditions. Power plants have to stay half a mile from homes. Valar also owes the county at least three town halls and a cleanup bond.

Valar joined the Energy Department’s Reactor Pilot Program in August 2025, NPR reported. In February, a military C-17 cargo plane carried Valar’s test reactor to Utah from California. It went critical in June, meaning it sustained a nuclear chain reaction on its own.

Valar has a second, much bigger plan for the federal land next door. Called “Project Beehive,” it would put about 456 small reactors and data centers on more than 9,000 acres near Price managed by the Bureau of Land Management, according to company documents NPR reviewed in September.

Those reactors would put out about 9.6 gigawatts in all, NPR reported. Utah produces about four gigawatts on average, though the state’s peak capacity in the summer can reach about 10. Only three new nuclear plants have been switched on in the U.S. since 2000.

There was no public hearing at Thursday’s meeting. Carbon County Attorney Christian Bryner told the panel early on that Utah law makes this kind of permit an administrative call. He added that the county commission had already taken comment when it set the zoning rules.

Valar Atomics and Carbon County did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

The Utah Trust Lands Administration, which rents the land to Valar, said in a statement to the DCNF that the lease gives the company control of the site so it can start due diligence and permitting.

“It is not approval to build,” the agency added.

The company paid the state a $400,000 bonus when it signed the 52-year lease, according to the agency. Rent on the 480 acres the company leases now is $14,400 annually during a five-year development phase. By the eighth year, it rises to $300,000 annually. The land brought in about $4,000 a year before the deal, and the money goes to a trust that funds K-12 schools in Utah.

Valar has an option on the other 160 acres, which the Utah National Guard leases for training, the agency said.

The Tribune reported that the plan also covers making nuclear fuel and storing it after it is spent.

The agency said spent fuel cannot be kept on the trust’s leased land, and Valar would have to buy any parcel it wants for that.

Valar’s own proposed conditions included a limit on how much water it uses, the Tribune reported. It also offered set hours for blasting and pile driving.

Valar wrote in its application that each part of the campus would be sized by the permit that covers it. For the reactors, that means a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or an authorization from the Energy Department.

The plan also has a natural gas plant. The Tribune reported that it would power the buildings for manufacturing, labs and data centers until the reactors are built, then serve as backup or cover peak periods.

Democratic Utah state Sen. Nate Blouin of Millcreek said that the “sizeable” gas plant showed up for the first time in the permit application, the Tribune reported.

“For a company promoting unproven nuclear technology to power a data center, that feels like a bait-and-switch,” Blouin told the Tribune in a text message.

Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor wrote in a reply to Blouin on X that the gas estimate describes a “full build” that “is many many years from now and uncertain.”

Nearly 200 people turned out for the meeting, the Tribune reported. Residents had already petitioned the Carbon County Commission for a temporary moratorium on big energy projects.

In September the Bureau of Land Management told NPR it was still reviewing whether Valar’s application for the federal land was complete.

Valar’s timeline has the first reactors there starting up sometime in 2028, according to NPR.

Under the conditions approved Thursday, the permit expires if Valar takes no substantial action within a year, though the planning commission can extend that deadline by up to 12 months.

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