A startup whose founder has vowed to "make nuclear great again" is planning to place hundreds of reactors on federal land in Utah, according to documents reviewed by NPR.
Valar Atomics is planning what it calls "Project Beehive" on over 9,000 acres of land held under the Bureau of Land Management near Price, Utah. The facility would include data centers and some 456 small nuclear reactors, along with a facility to produce nuclear fuel and others for storing nuclear waste, according to a proposal from the company to federal regulators.
In aggregate, the reactors would produce around 9.6 gigawatts of power for the data centers and even more thermal heat for other industrial applications. Currently, the entire state of Utah produces only around 4 gigawatts of electricity on average (though its peak capacity in summer can reach around 10 gigawatts).
The project's timeline calls for nonnuclear construction to begin as soon as the end of this year, with the first reactors coming online sometime in 2028.
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Valar has also sought the use of around 650 acres of state land as part of the same project, according to state records. The Salt Lake Tribune first reported on the project's use of state land last week, but not the much larger proposed use of federal lands.
The project has raised alarm among local activists, who are already facing a slew of data center proposals in the state.
"It's concerning to see that the Trump administration, with the support of the state of Utah, is pushing this forward on significant acreage of public lands," said Neal Clark, wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a Utah-based nonprofit that seeks to protect public lands.
"The coalition of people who are concerned about these things completely transcends political lines," added Lexi Tuddenham, the executive director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, which has tracked nuclear-related industries in the state. Tuddenham said that at the moment her primary goal is to raise awareness. "The biggest thing we can do right now is to let people know about it."
In a written statement, the Bureau of Land Management's Utah office confirmed it had received an application from the company.
"We are currently reviewing the application for completeness," it told NPR in an email. As the application moves through the required National Environmental Policy Act process, "we will make sure the public has meaningful opportunities to provide input," it added.
Valar did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment. In an interview with NPR in July, Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor said his company was committed to safety and community engagement. "We're doing it responsibly and accountably to this community," he said of a smaller test reactor that the company was operating in a neighboring county.
Small reactors, big plan
Project Beehive reveals the scale of the ambitions held by a new generation of companies planning a comeback for nuclear power. The companies are backed by the Trump administration, which has enacted a slew of regulatory reforms over the past year and a half to make their "small modular reactors" easier to test and build.
Valar has been both closely involved with those reforms and a beneficiary of them. Taylor was in the room when President Trump signed a series of executive orders last year designed to accelerate the development of nuclear power, and his company was accepted into the Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program in August 2025. This past February, the U.S. military flew Valar's test reactor from California to Utah aboard a C-17 transport aircraft.
The reactor, known as Ward 250, received rapid approval this year after the Department of Energy conducted a quiet overhaul of its internal safety and security regulations for nuclear reactors. It achieved criticality by reaching a self-sustaining nuclear reaction in June, in a tentlike structure in the Utah desert about 30 miles from the site of Project Beehive.
At a press event on July 1, the company marked another milestone when it used Ward 250 to produce electricity. Taylor powered up the test reactor and used a simple thermoelectric system to run a single Nvidia microchip.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Valar Atomics just became the first startup in history to make nuclear electricity right here," he told the crowd.
The scale of Project Beehive vastly outstrips that July demonstration. Since the turn of the century, the U.S. has switched on just three new nuclear power plants, producing a total of around 3.4 gigawatts of electricity. Those reactors are far larger than the small modular reactors that Valar plans to use, and each costs many billions of dollars to build.
Valar and other companies are hoping to upend the nuclear business model because small reactors can be mass-produced and placed in series, like a set of nuclear batteries. Valar's 25-megawatt electric units could be installed one at a time, allowing Project Beehive to be built in phases over a number of years. That in turn would reduce the cost and allow the site to enter operation relatively quickly. According to a document reviewed by NPR, the full site could be completed by 2032.
Tuddenham said she thinks the use of federal lands for such a project is unprecedented. "In this case, I think it's bigger than the local community," she said. "If we have facilities like this on public land for waste storage, for massive nuclear development, for data centers, that's going to have tremendous implications for how public lands are used."
NPR's Shannon Bond contributed to this report.
Contact Geoff Brumfiel on Signal at gbrumfiel.13
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