A Valar Atomics microreactor is seen on a C-17 aircraft, without nuclear fuel, at March Air Reserve Base in California on February 15. The reactor was transported from March Air Reserve Base to Hill Air Force Base in Utah.
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Matthew Daly/AP
A startup whose founder has promised to “make nuclear energy great again” plans 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 more than 9,000 acres of land under the Bureau of Land Management near Price, Utah. The facility would include data centers and about 456 small nuclear reactors, along with a facility to produce nuclear fuel and others to store nuclear waste, according to a company proposal to federal regulators.
Together, the reactors would produce about 9.6 gigawatts of power for data centers and even more thermal heat for other industrial applications. Currently, the entire state of Utah produces only about 4 gigawatts of electricity on average (although its peak capacity in the summer can reach about 10 gigawatts).
The project schedule calls for non-nuclear construction to begin later this year, with the first reactors coming online sometime in 2028.
Valar also sought the use of about 650 acres of state land as part of the same project, according to state records. He Salt Lake Grandstand It first reported on the project’s use of state lands last week, but not on the much larger proposed use of federal lands.
The project has raised alarm among local activists, who are already facing a number 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 across a significant acreage of public lands,” said Neal Clark, wilderness director for 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 cuts across political lines,” added Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of the Utah Alliance for a Healthy Environment, which has tracked nuclear energy-related industries in the state. Tuddenham said right now his main goal is to raise awareness. “The most important thing we can do now is let people know.”
In a written statement, the Utah office of the Bureau of Land Management confirmed it had received a request from the company.
“We are currently reviewing the application for completeness,” he told NPR in an email. As the application moves through the process required by the National Environmental Policy Act, “we will ensure that the public has meaningful opportunities to provide input,” he 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 being accountable to this community,” he said of a smaller test reactor the company was operating in a neighboring county.
Small reactors, big plan
Project Beehive reveals the magnitude of the ambitions of a new generation of companies planning the return of nuclear energy. The companies are backed by the Trump administration, which has enacted a series of regulatory reforms over the past year and a half to make its “small modular reactors” easier to test and build.
Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor (right) and Energy Secretary Chris Wright (left) support President Trump as he makes an announcement about American nuclear innovation on July 24. Valar has been both an advocate for nuclear regulatory reform and a beneficiary of changes made by the Trump administration.
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Valar has been closely involved with and benefited from those reforms. Taylor was in the room when President Trump signed a series of executive orders last year designed to accelerate the development of nuclear energy, and his company was accepted into the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program in August 2025. Last February, the US military flew the Valar test reactor from California to Utah aboard a C-17 transport plane.
The reactor, known as Ward 250, received quick approval this year after the Energy Department conducted a quiet review of its internal safety standards for nuclear reactors. It achieved criticality by achieving a self-sustaining nuclear reaction in June, in a tent-like structure in the Utah desert, about 30 miles from the Project Beehive site.
At a press event on July 1, the company marked another milestone when it used Ward 250 to produce electricity. Taylor turned on 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 produce nuclear electricity right here,” he told the crowd.
The scale of Project Beehive far exceeds the July demonstration. Since the beginning of the century, the United States has fired up only three new nuclear plants, producing a total of about 3.4 gigawatts of electricity. Those reactors are much larger than the small modular reactors Valar plans to use, and each costs many billions of dollars to build.
Valar and other companies hope to fundamentally change 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 power units could be installed one at a time, allowing Project Beehive to be built in phases over several years. This, in turn, would reduce the cost and allow the site to come online relatively quickly. According to a document reviewed by NPR, the entire site could be completed in 2032.
Tuddenham said he believes the use of federal lands for such a project is unprecedented. “In this case, I think it’s bigger than the local community,” he said. “If we have facilities like this on public lands for waste storage, for massive nuclear development, for data centers, that will have huge implications for how public lands are used.”
NPR’s Shannon Bond contributed to this report.
Contact Geoff Brumfiel on Signal at gbrumfiel.13
