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. Her husband spent years working in the namesake coal mines of Carbon County, a rugged pocket of central Utah where energy and the economy have long been intrinsically linked—often at a steep price to the health and safety of county residents.
"We’ve had the coal. We’ve dealt, the whole community, with black lung," O’Neil said, reflecting on decades of heavy industrial extraction. "The explosions, the fires, and all the things that came along with it."
Now, a completely new industry and an unprecedented form of energy production are preparing to move near her rural home. And O’Neil says the rapid influx of high-tech developments has her and her neighbors even more worried than they were about the familiar dangers that accompanied their long history with coal.
"It’s all descending, these data centers," said O’Neil, who tracks mysterious new projects in the works and shares updates with local residents on Facebook community pages. "They’re setting these things within a couple of miles of homes."
Her latest updates involve a flurry of community chatter about Valar Atomics, an ambitious nuclear startup. The company plans to build a massive mega-complex consisting of 456 small modular reactors—a technology that remains largely untested and unproven for commercial use in the United States—on vast tracts of Bureau of Land Management land within the county. According to a report from National Public Radio, the project will store radioactive waste on-site and power an array of heavy industrial activities, including massive data centers. Dubbed "Project Beehive," the development has received clear support from the state of Utah and will incorporate a square mile of state-owned trust lands.
Valar Atomics is not the only player looking at the region. Another large-scale data center complex planned for Carbon County, developed by Altigen Energy and dubbed "Jurassic Spark," will cover hundreds of acres and include a massive natural gas power plant to supply continuous electricity.
The prospective shift represents a dramatic pivot for Carbon County. The region’s coal mines produced nearly 10 million tons of coal in 2006, serving as the undisputed backbone of the local economy. However, a sweeping transition toward cheaper energy sources, such as renewables and natural gas, compounded by severely depleted supplies in the local coal seams, rapidly crippled the region’s main economic engine over the course of just a few decades. By 2023, not a single pound of coal was mined in Carbon County.
"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 new data center proposals rely on coal. The Utah Trust Lands Administration recently agreed to lease a square mile of its state-owned land for up to 100 years to Valar Atomics. The nuclear startup intends to utilize that lease to run a portion of its small modular reactors, process its uranium TRISO-fuel to feed the reactors, construct water desalination facilities, manufacture steel, refine critical minerals, and support energy-hungry data centers.
The Valar site is expected to generate approximately $35 million in lease rents over a 50-year period, according to financial projections presented by Trust Lands Administration staff to its board. Revenue collected from the project directly benefits Utah public schools. The state agency has declined to comment publicly on the specifics of the Valar project.
During a September board meeting, three Carbon County residents who are currently employed or expected to be employed by Valar spoke passionately in favor of the project. All three sitting Carbon County commissioners also voiced their unreserved support for the developments.
"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 assertion. She ran for a seat on the county commission, and as an unaffiliated candidate, she was required to collect 300 signatures to land a spot on the ballot. She said the opinions she heard from everyday citizens during that petition process were overwhelmingly opposed to the rapid arrival of data centers and nuclear plants.
"People are up in arms," Lupo said. "Torches and pitchforks. Because they’re not being heard."
Governor Spencer Cox, U.S. Senator John Curtis, and other high-ranking Utah officials welcomed Valar to the state earlier this year, allowing the company to test its "Ward250" microreactor at the San Rafael Energy Lab in neighboring Emery County. Valar announced it had achieved "self-sustaining criticality" in June—a complex process where atoms split and maintain a steady fission chain reaction without requiring an external feed of additional neutrons. The company has subsequent plans to power a 30-megawatt nuclear-powered artificial intelligence data center in Emery County as well, working in partnership with computer-chip giant Nvidia.
Despite high-profile backing, small modular reactors have yet to be deployed for commercial use anywhere in the United States. During a recent Trust Lands Administration meeting, Mike Nelson, the board’s chair, seemed to acknowledge that the agreement with Valar came with considerable unknowns.
"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 nuclear proposals revive painful historical anxieties. Utah carries a troubled, deeply personal history with nuclear testing. Lupo’s mother was only 38 years old when she died, a tragedy Lupo firmly believes was caused by the downwind health effects of radioactive weapons testing conducted in nearby Nevada during the 1950s. Her mother was living in Carbon County at the time of the tests, and Lupo believes the radioactive fallout also caused her grandfather’s death.
"I will never, ever be a proponent of nuclear," Lupo said.
Even before the proposal to build Valar’s massive complex started causing a stir, rumors had swirled throughout the region about the possibility of another major data center campus establishing roots in Carbon County.
Altigen, a company specializing in building natural gas power plants explicitly designed to serve data centers, selected an area east of Wellington for its 1,200-acre "Jurassic Spark" project. According to meeting minutes from the local Community Economic Development Board, the project is nearly double the physical footprint of the Valar campus. Current plans call for constructing an initial 250-megawatt gas plant to power the complex, but the facility could eventually expand to produce up to 3 gigawatts of electricity, according to Jensen. For the sake of comparison, the entire state of Utah currently consumes about 4 gigawatts of electricity. Altigen did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Data center developers are increasingly turning to natural gas to power their intensive projects because regional utility providers have struggled to supply the staggering, uninterrupted electricity demands required by modern AI servers.
Last year, the Utah Legislature passed Senate Bill 132, a measure allowing private companies with energy demands of 100 megawatts or more to construct their own self-contained generating stations. The legislative intent was to stimulate business development and attract data centers without placing an undue strain on the existing electrical grid utilized by residential and commercial ratepayers. The direct result has been a sudden surge of builders issuing plans and applying for permits to construct massive gas-fired power plants across rural landscapes.
Natural gas, however, remains a potent greenhouse pollutant composed primarily of methane. It drives regional air pollution and accelerates global climate change, while natural gas combustion and industrial servers can generate immense amounts of localized heat.
Nuclear plants can produce even higher levels of waste 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 sits precisely within a valley, heavily 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 noted that water availability remains her single greatest source of distress. The region is historically water-strapped, with virtually every drop of available water already claimed and spoken for.
Valar maintains that its reactors utilize closed-loop helium cooling systems requiring minimal water, and data center developers have similarly asserted that their facilities will rely on closed-loop cooling technologies with exceptionally low water footprints.
On July 3, Carbon County issued an official statement responding directly to growing resident concerns. The region faces a difficult, pressing economic reality due to the structural decline of the coal industry, the statement emphasized. That economic collapse has shifted a disproportionate share of the county’s property tax burden directly onto local homeowners and remaining small businesses. Data centers have earned the enthusiastic backing of the county commissioners largely because of their potential to infuse municipal tax rolls with much-needed revenue.
The county statement also addressed widespread resident concerns regarding non-disclosure agreements signed between local officials and incoming 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 signed formal nondisclosure agreements with Altigen or Valar. However, such agreements are reportedly common practice for corporations looking to conduct business evaluations 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 municipal positions to accept a job opportunity in Colorado.
Although he was not personally privy to any nondisclosure agreements involving the newer data center projects, Stainbrook expressed a belief that the county commissioners were acting in the best financial interests of the region by aggressively pursuing new jobs and capital investment.
O’Neil, viewing the rapid industrial transformation from her home situated along U.S. Highway 6, sees the situation from a vastly different perspective.
"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."