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.