This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah.
CARBON COUNTY, Utah — Cindy O’Neil understands all too well the volatile boom-and-bust cycles of heavy industry. For years, her husband spent his days working deep inside the subterranean coal mines that gave Carbon County its name. In this rugged pocket of central Utah, the local economy and traditional energy production have long been intrinsically linked—often at a devastating sacrifice to the health and safety of the county’s residents.
"We’ve had the coal. We’ve dealt, the whole community, with black lung," O’Neil reflected, cataloging the toll of the region’s industrial past. "The explosions, the fires, and all the things that came along with it."
Now, however, an entirely new industry and a radically different type of energy production are preparing to move in near her rural home. O’Neil says the impending arrival of these high-tech facilities has her and her neighbors feeling even more anxious and unsettled than they ever were during their long, complicated history with coal.
"It’s all descending, these data centers," said O’Neil, who spends her time tracking mysterious new industrial projects in the works and sharing vital updates with local residents on Facebook community pages. "They’re setting these things within a couple of miles of homes."
Her latest digital updates and neighborhood conversations are dominated by chatter surrounding Valar Atomics, an ambitious nuclear startup. The company has laid out plans to construct a massive mega-complex consisting of 456 small modular reactors—a nuclear technology that remains largely untested and unproven for commercial deployment across the United States. According to reports from National Public Radio, the proposed complex would occupy vast tracts of Bureau of Land Management territory within the county, store radioactive waste on-site, and power a wide array of heavy industrial activities, including sprawling data centers. Dubbed "Project Beehive," the development has secured backing from the state of Utah and is slated to incorporate a square mile of state-owned trust lands.
At the same time, another massive data center complex is taking shape in the county. Altigen Energy’s proposed "Jurassic Spark" project will cover hundreds of acres and feature a major natural gas power plant to feed its immense energy appetite.
For a region built on fossil fuels, it represents an abrupt and jarring shift. Carbon County’s coal mines were once a powerhouse, producing nearly 10 million tons of coal in 2006 alone. But a combination of market forces—including a broader national transition toward cheaper energy alternatives like renewables and natural gas—alongside steadily depleted supplies within the local coal seams, managed to sink the region’s primary economic engine in just a matter of decades. By 2023, the last active operations ceased, meaning not a single pound of coal has been mined in Carbon County since.
"They say everything’s left us, and if we don’t grab these table scraps, we’re not going to get anything," O’Neil said. "I don’t think our county has to take the table scraps."
None of Carbon County’s newly proposed data center projects rely on coal. Instead, the Utah Trust Lands Administration recently finalized an agreement to lease a square mile of state-owned land for up to a century to Valar Atomics. The nuclear startup intends to leverage this long-term lease to operate a portion of its small modular reactors, process its uranium TRISO-fuel to feed the reactors, establish water desalination operations, manufacture steel, refine critical minerals, and provide steady electricity to energy-hungry data centers.
Official presentations delivered by Trust Lands Administration staff to the agency’s board indicate that the Valar site is projected to generate roughly $35 million in lease rents over a 50-year span. Revenue collected from the agreement is earmarked to benefit public schools throughout Utah. The state agency has consistently declined to comment on the specifics of the Valar project.
During a board meeting held in September, three Carbon County residents who are either currently employed by Valar or anticipate working for the company spoke out strongly in favor of the development. All three members of the Carbon County Commission also voiced their unqualified support for the initiatives.
"We realize that this topic is a hot button now, along with data centers," said Larry Jensen, one of the county commissioners. "It’s important that you understand that the Carbon County Commissioners are committed to allowing these things to move forward. Even with the pushback—we realize that there are a few in our community who will push back—but the silent majority are the ones that we really represent."
Cheryl Lupo, a longtime resident of the county, strongly rejected that characterization. Lupo ran for a seat on the county commission, and as an unaffiliated candidate, she was required to collect 300 signatures from local voters just to secure a spot on the ballot. She noted that the opinions she gathered during that grassroots signature-gathering process were overwhelmingly opposed to the influx of data centers and nuclear plants.
"People are up in arms," Lupo said. "Torches and pitchforks. Because they’re not being heard."
High-ranking state and federal leaders, including Utah Governor Spencer Cox and U.S. Senator John Curtis, welcomed Valar to the state earlier this year. Their political support paved the way for the startup to test its "Ward250" microreactor at the San Rafael Energy Lab in neighboring Emery County. In June, Valar publicly announced it had achieved "self-sustaining criticality"—a nuclear physics milestone where atoms split and successfully maintain a steady fission chain reaction without requiring an external feed of additional neutrons. Looking ahead, the company has announced plans to power a 30-megawatt, nuclear-powered artificial intelligence data center in Emery County as well, working in direct partnership with computer-chip giant Nvidia.
Despite this high-profile momentum, small modular reactors have yet to be deployed for commercial use anywhere in the United States. During a recent Trust Lands Administration meeting, board chair Mike Nelson appeared to concede that the agreement with Valar involved a significant degree of uncertainty.
"We weren’t always sure what to ask about," Nelson remarked while offering praise for the nuclear startup, "and probably still aren’t sure of everything to ask about because this is a first, right?"
For many families in the region, the push toward nuclear energy strikes a painful nerve. Utah carries a troubled historical legacy stemming from mid-century atomic weapons testing. Lupo’s mother was only 38 years old when she passed away, a tragedy Lupo firmly attributes to the downwind radioactive fallout drifting over from nuclear weapons testing sites in nearby Nevada during the 1950s, while her mother was living in Carbon County. She believes the very same radioactive fallout contributed to the premature death of her grandfather.
"I will never, ever be a proponent of nuclear," Lupo said.
Even before the proposal to build Valar’s expansive nuclear complex began generating intense community friction, rumors had already started swirling about the possibility of an entirely separate data center campus within Carbon County.
Altigen, a company that specializes in constructing dedicated natural gas-powered plants to supply energy to data centers, selected a 1,200-acre site east of Wellington for its "Jurassic Spark" project. According to meeting minutes from the local Community Economic Development Board, the campus would be nearly double the physical footprint of the Valar development. Initial project blueprints call for building a 250-megawatt natural gas plant to power the complex at the outset, though output could eventually scale up to 3 gigawatts of electricity, according to Commissioner Jensen. To put that staggering figure in perspective, the entire state of Utah currently consumes roughly 4 gigawatts of electricity. Altigen did not respond to requests for comment regarding the project.
Data center developers are increasingly turning toward natural gas to power their expanding infrastructure because traditional regional utilities have struggled to keep pace with the massive, uninterrupted electricity demands of modern AI servers.
Last year, the Utah Legislature enacted Senate Bill 132, a measure designed to allow private companies with massive energy demands of 100 megawatts or greater to construct their own self-contained electricity generating stations. The primary objective was to foster aggressive commercial and business development—particularly data centers—without placing an unsustainable strain on the shared electrical grid relied upon by everyday residents. The legislative change triggered an immediate surge of developers filing plans and applying for permits to construct gas-fired power plants across the state.
Natural gas, however, remains a potent greenhouse gas pollutant primarily composed of methane. It directly accelerates global climate change, degrades regional air quality, and generates immense amounts of industrial heat.
Furthermore, nuclear installations can produce even more waste heat than natural gas plants because they operate at lower thermodynamic efficiencies, according to Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.
"If you’re in a contained valley, it concentrates the problem," Davies warned.
As geography dictates, the Wellington area sits squarely inside a valley, tightly hemmed in by the towering Wasatch Range to the west and the Book Cliffs to the north and east.
"The heat island that the data centers produce, that concerns me," said Aspen Westenskow, a lifelong resident of Carbon and Emery counties. "They go clear all this land, the brush, the trees. What helps cool the planet down? Not flat dirt."
Westenskow added that dwindling water resources remain her single greatest source of anxiety in a region that is historically water-strapped, where virtually every drop of available water is already spoken for.
In response to such environmental concerns, Valar maintains that its advanced reactors utilize closed-loop helium cooling systems requiring minimal water usage. Similarly, data center developers have repeatedly asserted that their facilities will employ closed-loop cooling technologies designed to keep water demands exceptionally low.
To address mounting local pushback, Carbon County officials issued a public statement on July 3 addressing the concerns of their constituents. The region confronts a severe and difficult economic reality brought on by the steep decline of the coal industry, the statement emphasized. The collapse of mining revenues shifted a disproportionate share of the county’s property tax burden directly onto the shoulders of remaining homeowners and small local businesses. Consequently, the data centers earned the unanimous backing of the county commissioners due to their potential to infuse local tax rolls with much-needed municipal revenue.
The official statement also addressed widespread resident concerns regarding non-disclosure agreements signed between local entities and corporate developers.
"Without these agreements," the statement read, "some companies would choose not to explore projects in Carbon County."
It remains unclear whether the county entered into non-disclosure agreements with either Altigen or Valar. However, such agreements are routine and common for commercial enterprises exploring business opportunities in Carbon County. Oran Stainbrook, a local resident, noted that he was aware of several such arrangements during his tenure serving on the county planning commission and economic development board. He resigned from those advisory positions a few months ago to accept a job opportunity in Colorado.
Although he stated he had no direct knowledge of specific non-disclosure pacts involving the recent data center proposals, Stainbrook expressed confidence that the commissioners were acting in good faith to protect the county’s long-term economic interests by actively pursuing new jobs and outside investment.
Back on her property along U.S. Highway 6, Cindy O’Neil views the situation through a very different lens.
"You shouldn’t be hiding what you and the company are going to bring to a community," O’Neil said, "and not tell the community until it’s too late and a done deal."