A nuclear energy startup led by a founder who has publicly promised to "make nuclear great again" is pursuing an ambitious plan to install hundreds of small reactors across federal acreage in Utah, according to internal documents obtained and reviewed by NPR.
The company, Valar Atomics, has named the undertaking "Project Beehive." As envisioned, it would rise on more than 9,000 acres administered by the Bureau of Land Management in the vicinity of Price, Utah, a rural community in the eastern part of the state.
Under the proposal submitted to federal regulators, the site would combine data centers with roughly 456 small nuclear reactors. It would also host an operation dedicated to manufacturing nuclear fuel and additional facilities designed to store nuclear waste.
The generating capacity described in the plan is striking in scale. Collectively, the reactors would deliver approximately 9.6 gigawatts of electricity to power the data centers, with an even greater amount of thermal heat reserved for other industrial uses.
To put that figure in perspective, the entire state of Utah currently generates only about 4 gigawatts of electricity on average. Even during periods of peak demand in the summer, the state's total capacity reaches only around 10 gigawatts, according to federal energy data.
The project's development schedule is equally aggressive. Nonnuclear construction could break ground as soon as the end of this year, while the first reactors would not be expected to begin operating until sometime in 2028. That sequencing reflects the fact that much of the site work, infrastructure, and conventional building can proceed well before any nuclear components are installed or activated.
Valar's ambitions extend beyond federal property. State records indicate the company has also requested the use of roughly 650 acres of land owned by Utah as part of the same project.
News of the state-land component surfaced publicly last week when The Salt Lake Tribune reported on it. According to NPR, however, the far larger proposal to build on federal lands had not previously been disclosed.
The disclosure has unsettled local activists, who say they are already contending with a wave of data center proposals across Utah. Those projects, driven by the soaring electricity demands of artificial intelligence and cloud computing, have prompted growing concerns about land use, water consumption, and strain on the power grid.
Project Beehive would appear to sit at the intersection of two powerful and controversial trends: the rapid expansion of energy-hungry data centers and the renewed national push to deploy nuclear power as a carbon-free solution. By pairing small reactors directly with computing facilities, Valar is proposing what is sometimes called a "behind-the-meter" arrangement, in which power is generated on-site rather than drawn from the broader grid.
Small nuclear reactors, often referred to as microreactors, are promoted by their advocates as cheaper, faster to build, and more flexible than the large conventional plants that have historically defined the industry. Yet the technology remains largely unproven at commercial scale, and no U.S. licensing framework has yet fully matured around deployments of this size and configuration.
Placing more than 450 reactors on a single site would represent a deployment of unprecedented scale for the emerging advanced nuclear sector. It also raises questions about regulatory oversight, emergency planning, fuel supply, and the handling of radioactive waste, all of which would fall under the scrutiny of federal agencies.
The selection of public land as the host for such an industrial complex is likely to intensify debates over how federally managed acreage should be used. The Bureau of Land Management oversees millions of acres in Utah, and proposals that convert large tracts for energy and technology development frequently draw opposition from conservation groups, local residents, and tribal communities.
For Valar, the project represents a high-stakes bet that co-locating nuclear generation with data centers can solve the power constraints now limiting the growth of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Whether regulators, state officials, and the surrounding community embrace that bet will determine if Project Beehive advances from proposal to construction.
The company has not yet publicly detailed how it would finance the project, secure reactor components at that volume, or manage the waste streams its fuel and storage facilities would generate. Those gaps are likely to draw scrutiny as the proposal moves through federal and state review processes in the months ahead.
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