Details emerge on Valar’s Utah plans

[Marlin]

Details emerge on Valar's Utah plans

https://www.ans.org/news/2026-10-05/article-8462/details-emerge-on-valars-utah-plans/

[Core Content]

Reactor start-up Valar Atomics applied to lease over 9,000 acres of federal land in Utah for Project Beehive. The proposed facility would house 456 reactors, co-located data centers, and a fuel production facility.

The project highlights ongoing regulatory questions regarding how developers will transition from Department of Energy authorizations to Nuclear Regulatory Commission commercial licensing. Observers are tracking Valar's aggressive construction timeline, which targets initial operations by 2028, alongside the broader implications for co-siting microreactors with large industrial power loads.

Last week, NPR reported that reactor start-up Valar Atomics is planning to construct a new facility in Utah that would feature 456 of its reactors. This campus, called Project Beehive, would sit on more than 9,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land and would feature co-located data centers and a fuel production facility.

More on the land: On September 24, the Salt Lake Tribune first reported that Valar had applied to lease 480 acres of land owned by the state of Utah. This land (near the towns of Price and Wellington) is entirely surrounded by BLM land, but first reports indicated that the Valar project would be sited only on state-owned land.

The much larger application for the use of more than 9,000 federal acres was not revealed until NPR's report on September 30. The state and federal applications should almost certainly be considered parts of the same project, as the land involved in each is in roughly the same area, east of Price and north of Wellington.

Read the full article at ans.org:
https://www.ans.org/news/2026-10-05/article-8462/details-emerge-on-valars-utah-plans/