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 better than most. For years, her husband spent his days working deep inside Carbon County’s namesake coal mines. In this remote pocket of central Utah, energy production and the local economy 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 the heavy human toll exacted by generations of fossil fuel extraction. “The explosions, the fires, and all the things that came along with it.”
Now, a radically different industry and an entirely new class of heavy 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, difficult 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 community discussions revolve 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 for commercial deployment in the United States—spread across vast tracts of Bureau of Land Management land in Carbon County. According to a report from National Public Radio, the sprawling project will also store radioactive waste on-site while powering an array of heavy industrial activities, including massive data centers. Dubbed “Project Beehive,” the initiative has secured backing from the state of Utah and will incorporate a square mile of lucrative state-owned trust lands.
At the same time, another massive data center complex is slated for the county. Altigen Energy’s proposed “Jurassic Spark” project will cover hundreds of acres and feature a colossal natural gas power plant designed to feed the relentless electricity demands of modern artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The transition marks an abrupt and jarring shift for a region whose identity has been forged in the dark depths of underground mines. At its peak in 2006, Carbon County’s coal mines produced nearly 10 million tons of coal. However, a rapid nationwide shift toward cheaper energy alternatives—such as utility-scale renewables and natural gas—combined with heavily depleted supplies in the local coal seams, crippled the region’s primary economic engine in the span of just a few decades. By 2023, the last remaining operations ground to a halt, and 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 developments rely on coal for their massive power needs. Instead, the Utah Trust Lands Administration recently entered into an agreement to lease a square mile of its state-owned land for up to 100 years to Valar Atomics. The nuclear startup intends to leverage this long-term lease to operate a portion of its small modular reactors, process its specialized uranium TRISO-fuel to feed those reactors, construct water desalination facilities, manufacture steel, refine critical minerals, and provide energy for incoming data center campuses.
According to financial projections presented by the Trust Lands Administration staff to its governing board, the Valar site is expected to generate an estimated $35 million in lease rents over a 50-year period. Revenue collected from the leasing agreement directly benefits Utah public schools, though the state agency has declined to comment publicly on the specifics of the Valar project.
During a contentious board meeting last month, 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 elected Carbon County commissioners also voiced their unconditional support for the nuclear initiative.
“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, sharply rejected that characterization. Lupo is running for a seat on the county commission and, as an unaffiliated candidate, was required to gather 300 petition signatures to secure her place on the ballot. She noted that the overwhelming majority of opinions she encountered while talking to voters across the county were intensely opposed to the influx of data centers and nuclear facilities.
“People are up in arms,” Lupo said. “Torches and pitchforks. Because they’re not being heard.”
State leaders, including Governor Spencer Cox, U.S. Senator John Curtis, and other high-ranking Utah officials, officially 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. Valar announced in June that it had successfully achieved “self-sustaining criticality”—a physics milestone where uranium atoms split and maintain a steady, self-sustaining fission chain reaction without requiring external neutrons to be fed into the core. The startup has also announced plans to power a separate 30-megawatt nuclear-powered AI data center in Emery County in a strategic 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 last month’s Trust Lands Administration meeting, board chair Mike Nelson appeared to acknowledge that the unprecedented agreement with Valar carried significant uncertainties.
“We weren’t always sure what to ask about,” Nelson said 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 residents, the prospect of hosting nuclear technology brings back painful historical anxieties. Utah carries a deeply troubled legacy tied to nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War. Lupo’s mother was only 38 years old when she passed away, a tragedy Lupo firmly believes was the result of downwind radioactive fallout drifting from atomic weapons tests conducted in neighboring Nevada throughout the 1950s. At the time, her mother was living in Carbon County, where Lupo also believes the fallout contributed to her grandfather’s premature death.
“I will never, ever be a proponent of nuclear,” Lupo said.
Even before the proposal to build Valar’s expansive nuclear complex began causing a major stir, persistent rumors had already begun swirling regarding the possibility of an entirely separate data center campus in Carbon County.
Altigen, a specialized developer that builds dedicated natural gas power plants to supply remote data centers, selected a 1,200-acre site east of Wellington for its “Jurassic Spark” project. According to local Community Economic Development Board meeting minutes, the sprawling campus would be nearly double the physical footprint of the Valar development. Initial blueprints call for the construction of a 250-megawatt natural gas power plant to feed the complex, but output could eventually scale up to a staggering 3 gigawatts of electricity, according to Commissioner Jensen. To put that figure in perspective, the entire state of Utah currently consumes approximately 4 gigawatts of power. (Altigen did not respond to requests for comment.)
Data center developers are increasingly turning to dedicated natural gas generation as regional public utilities struggle to keep pace with the staggering, uninterrupted electricity demands driven by artificial intelligence servers.
Last year, the Utah Legislature passed Senate Bill 132, a measure allowing private corporations with energy demands of 100 megawatts or greater to construct their own self-contained generating stations. The legislative intent was to stimulate regional business development and attract data centers without imposing a crippling burden on the traditional electrical grid relied upon by everyday residents. The legislative change triggered an immediate surge of developers issuing formal plans and filing permits to construct localized gas-fired power plants.
Natural gas, however, is a potent greenhouse gas primarily composed of methane that accelerates global climate change while degrading local air quality in surrounding communities. Furthermore, large-scale natural gas power plants are known for generating immense amounts of localized ambient heat.
Scientists warn that nuclear facilities can release even greater quantities 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.
Geographically, the Wellington area is situated squarely inside a natural basin, tightly hemmed in by the towering Wasatch Range to the west and the rugged 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 chronic water scarcity remains her single greatest source of anxiety. The region is historically water-strapped, with virtually every drop of available water already claimed by existing agricultural and municipal rights.
While Valar maintains that its advanced reactors will utilize closed-loop helium cooling systems requiring minimal water resources, and data center developers have similarly pledged to implement low-consumption cooling technologies, local skepticism remains high.
On July 3, the Carbon County government issued an official public statement responding directly to mounting community concerns. The region faces a grim economic reality following the collapse of the coal industry, the statement explained, a structural decline that has inadvertently shifted a much heavier property tax burden onto individual homeowners and surviving local businesses. Data centers have earned the enthusiastic backing of the county commissioners precisely because of their potential to infuse municipal tax rolls with much-needed revenue.
The official statement also addressed growing public concern over the use of non-disclosure agreements, which several residents have criticized for obscuring the true scope of industrial negotiations.
“Without these agreements,” the statement reads, “some companies would choose not to explore projects in Carbon County.”
It remains unclear whether the county signed formal nondisclosure agreements with Altigen or Valar, but such confidentiality pacts are standard practice for corporate entities evaluating investments in Carbon County. Oran Stainbrook, a local resident, noted that he was aware of several such agreements during his tenure serving on the county planning commission and economic development board. He resigned from those advisory positions recently to accept a job opportunity in Colorado.
Although he was not personally briefed on any confidentiality pacts involving the newer data center proposals, Stainbrook expressed confidence that the county commissioners were acting in the region’s best economic interest by actively pursuing jobs and external investment.
O’Neil, viewing the rapid pace of development from her home along U.S. Highway 6, sees the situation through a fundamentally 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.”