This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah.
Cindy O’Neil understands the boom-and-bust cycles of industry intimately. For years, her husband spent his working life deep inside Carbon County’s namesake coal mines, laboring in a pocket of central Utah where the economy and energy production have long been intrinsically linked—often at a devastating sacrifice to the health and well-being of the county’s residents.
“We’ve had the coal. We’ve dealt, the whole community, with black lung,” O’Neil said, reflecting on decades of heavy industrial reliance. “The explosions, the fires, and all the things that came along with it.”
Now, a completely new type of energy production and industrial development is poised to move near her rural home. But instead of bringing a sense of familiar economic relief, O’Neil says the incoming wave has her and her neighbors feeling even more anxious than they were during the darkest days of the coal era.
“It’s all descending, these data centers,” said O’Neil, who spends her time tracking mysterious new 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 community discussions center heavily around Valar Atomics, an ambitious nuclear startup. The company has laid out plans to construct a massive mega-complex featuring 456 small modular reactors—a nuclear technology that remains largely untested and unproven at a commercial scale in the United States. According to reports from National Public Radio, the project will also store radioactive waste on site and power a diverse array of heavy industrial activities, including massive data centers.
Known as “Project Beehive,” the nuclear initiative has already earned official support from the state of Utah and is slated to occupy a square mile of state-owned trust lands out on the vast tracts of Bureau of Land Management territory spanning the county.
Valar is not alone in eyeing the region. Another expansive data center complex, dubbed “Jurassic Spark” by developer Altigen Energy, is planned for the county. This massive project will cover hundreds of acres of rural land and include a major natural gas-fired power plant to meet the staggering energy demands of modern digital infrastructure.
A Rapid and Abrupt Industrial Shift
This sudden pivot represents a dramatic and abrupt shift for Carbon County. At its peak in 2006, the region’s coal mines produced nearly 10 million tons of coal, driving a robust local economy. However, a combination of depleted supplies in the underground coal seams and a broader national market shift toward cheaper energy sources—such as natural gas and renewable energy—sank the region’s primary economic engine in just a matter of decades. By 2023, the decline was total: not a single pound of coal has been mined in Carbon County since.
Faced with this economic vacuum, local leaders argue that the community has few options left if it wants to survive and maintain basic public services.
“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, expressing deep frustration with the narrative presented to longtime residents. “I don’t think our county has to take the table scraps.”
None of the newly proposed data center projects or energy facilities in Carbon County call for the burning of coal. Instead, the Utah Trust Lands Administration recently finalized an agreement to lease a square mile of state-owned land for up to 100 years to Valar Atomics. The nuclear startup intends to leverage this long-term lease to run a portion of its small modular reactors, process its uranium TRISO-fuel to feed the reactors, build local water desalination infrastructure, manufacture steel, refine critical minerals, and support high-powered data centers.
Financial projections presented by Trust Lands Administration staff to its board indicate that the Valar site is expected to generate approximately $35 million in lease rents over a 50-year period. Revenue collected from the agreement is earmarked to benefit Utah’s public schools. The state agency itself has declined to comment directly on the Valar project.
Divided Local Opinions and Political Backing
During a state board meeting, three Carbon County residents who are either currently employed by Valar or anticipate working for the company spoke strongly in favor of the project. All three sitting Carbon County Commissioners also voiced their unconditional support for the development.
“[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 who is running for a seat on the county commission, strongly rejects that characterization of public sentiment. As an unaffiliated candidate, Lupo was required to collect 300 signatures from local voters to secure her spot on the ballot. She noted that the opinions she encountered during the petitioning process were overwhelmingly opposed to the influx of data centers and nuclear facilities.
“People are up in arms,” Lupo said, describing the local mood. “Torches and pitchforks. Because they’re not being heard.”
State leaders, meanwhile, have rolled out the red carpet for the emerging nuclear sector. Governor Spencer Cox, U.S. Senator John Curtis, and other high-ranking Utah officials welcomed Valar to the state earlier this year, clearing the way for the company to test its “Ward250” microreactor at the San Rafael Energy Lab in neighboring Emery County. In June, Valar announced that it had successfully achieved “self-sustaining criticality”—a physics process in which atoms split and maintain a steady fission chain reaction independently without requiring external neutrons. The company has also announced plans to power a separate 30-megawatt nuclear-powered artificial intelligence data center in Emery County in partnership with computer-chip giant Nvidia.
Despite the high-profile backing, small modular reactors have yet to be deployed for widespread commercial use anywhere in the United States. During a recent Trust Lands Administration meeting, board chair Mike Nelson appeared to acknowledge the heavy layer of unknowns surrounding the Valar agreement.
“We weren’t always sure what to ask about,” Nelson said, while still offering high praise for the startup. “And probably still aren’t sure of everything to ask about because this is a first, right?”
A Painful Legacy and Environmental Concerns
For many residents, the embrace of nuclear technology brings up painful historical anxieties. Utah carries a troubled, generational legacy stemming from the mid-20th-century atomic weapons testing programs in neighboring Nevada. Lupo’s mother was only 38 years old when she passed away, a tragedy Lupo firmly attributes to the downwind radioactive fallout that blanketed the region during the 1950s while her family was living in Carbon County. She believes the exact same radioactive exposure also caused her grandfather’s death.
“I will never, ever be a proponent of nuclear,” Lupo said.
Long before the Valar nuclear complex proposal began stirring up local controversy, rumors had already been swirling regarding the potential arrival of other massive digital infrastructure campuses in Carbon County.
Altigen, a company that specializes in building dedicated natural gas-powered generation plants specifically to support energy-hungry 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 project footprint is nearly double the size of the Valar campus. Initial plans call for constructing a 250-megawatt natural gas plant to power the complex, though capacity could eventually scale up to generate a staggering 3 gigawatts of electricity, according to Commissioner Jensen. For perspective, the entire state of Utah currently consumes about 4 gigawatts of power. (Altigen did not respond to requests for comment.)
Across the country, data center developers are increasingly turning to natural gas to fuel their projects because traditional regional utilities have struggled to keep pace with the immense electricity demands of modern AI servers.
Last year, the Utah Legislature passed Senate Bill 132, which allows private companies with energy demands of 100 megawatts or greater to construct their own self-contained electrical generating stations. The legislative intent was to stimulate economic development and attract data centers without placing an undue burden on the existing electrical grid utilized by residential ratepayers. The policy immediately triggered a surge of industrial developers issuing construction plans and applying for permits to build dedicated gas-fired power plants.
Environmental advocates point out that natural gas is a potent greenhouse pollutant comprised primarily of methane, driving climate change while degrading local air quality. Furthermore, natural gas plants are known for generating immense amounts of ambient heat.
Experts note that nuclear facilities can produce even greater amounts of heat than natural gas plants because they operate at lower thermodynamic efficiencies, according to Robert Davies, a professor of physics at Utah State University.
“If you’re in a contained valley, it concentrates the problem,” Davies said.
As geography dictates, the Wellington area sits squarely inside a valley, naturally hemmed in by the 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 regional water availability remains her single greatest source of distress in an already water-strapped desert landscape where every drop of water is fully allocated. While Valar maintains that its reactors will utilize closed-loop helium cooling systems requiring minimal water, and data center developers have made similar assurances regarding low water consumption, skepticism among residents remains high.
The Economic Reality and the Fight for Transparency
On July 3, the Carbon County government issued an official statement attempting to address growing resident concerns. The statement emphasized that the region faces a grim economic reality following the collapse of the coal industry, a transition that has shifted an increasingly heavy property tax burden onto remaining homeowners and local businesses. Data centers have earned the strong backing of the county commissioners precisely because they promise to inject much-needed revenue back into local tax rolls.
The statement also directly addressed questions surrounding non-disclosure agreements that local officials have signed with corporate entities. “Without these agreements,” the statement reads, “some companies would choose not to explore projects in Carbon County.”
It remains unclear whether the county entered into non-disclosure agreements with Altigen or Valar, but such confidentiality pacts are standard practice for corporations evaluating business opportunities in Carbon County. Oran Stainbrook, a local resident, noted that he was aware of several such agreements during his time serving on the county planning commission and economic development board, positions he resigned from recently to take a new job in Colorado.
While he was not personally aware of any non-disclosure agreements directly tying down the recent data center proposals, Stainbrook expressed confidence that the commissioners were acting in good faith to secure long-term jobs and capital investment for the region.
O’Neil, looking out from her home near U.S. Highway 6, views the lack of upfront communication 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.”