Details emerge on Valar’s Utah plans

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.

The BLM's Utah office confirmed to NPR that it is "currently reviewing the application for completeness" and that the public will have "meaningful opportunities to provide input" on the project. For its part, Valar told NPR that "no construction begins before permits and approvals, and the public process leads along our internal targets set the pace."

The regulatory angle: Mention of permits calls to mind another currently unclear facet of Valar's plan: its regulatory pathway. The company progressed through Department of Energy authorization for the permitting of Ward 250, its first demonstration reactor. The question of how DOE authorization will be leveraged into Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing for follow-on commercial deployments has yet to be fully settled by the DOE, NRC, and private industry. Whether Valar would pursue the new 10 CFR Part 53, the soon-to-come Part 57, or the established Part 50 or Part 52 is currently unknown.

Nor has the company formally engaged publicly in preapplication activities of any kind with the regulator. In fact, its closest association with the NRC at this writing is through a complex and ongoing lawsuit: State of Texas et al v. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Not to be confused with the unrelated NRC v. Texas-another federal court challenge between the state and the regulator-the State of Texas v. NRC challenges the NRC's authority to license small reactors, arguing that their inherent safety and minimal use of nuclear material exempt them from the NRC's strict requirements. The plaintiffs in this lawsuit, first filed in December 2024, included the states of Texas, Utah, and Louisiana; the Arizona State Legislature; and reactor start-ups Last Energy, Deep Fission, and Valar.

Almost two years on, the states involved have submitted a notice of voluntary dismissal ahead of any ruling, essentially dropping out of the lawsuit. The reactor developers (Valar included) are now currently conferring on what their next steps will be, according to a September 2 status report filed with the court.

So, with litigation slowly continuing and regulatory pathways still being formed, the future is unclear. It is also unclear whether the project's siting on federal land will confer on it any special regulatory benefits. The Department of Interior (the agency that encompasses the BLM) does not have Other Transactional Authority like the DOE or Department of Defense. The OTA framework has been used by both the DOE and DOD for the authorization of its recent reactor projects. Whether Valar aims to leverage its Ward 250 authorization into further DOE-approved deployments on Department of Interior land is unknown. However, the DOE has continually characterized its reactor authorizations as purpose-built to expedite the research and development of test reactors-a definition that would hardly fit a 456-unit data center campus.

At any rate, whatever path Valar intends to pursue, the clock is ticking. NPR reports that Valar aims to begin nonnuclear construction by the end of this year and to have first reactors on line in 2028.

The background: Utah is a natural fit for Valar's next project. While the company is headquartered in El Segundo, Calif., it was already closely partnered with the Beehive State through the Reactor Pilot Program. Through the RPP, Valar achieved criticality with its Ward 250 test reactor at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab-it was one of the four companies to reach this milestone by the July 4 deadline set by Executive Order 14301.

Ward 250 is a 100-kWt TRISO-fueled, high-temperature gas reactor. Valar has not definitively revealed the planned capacity for follow-on deployments of its reactor technology. However, CEO Isaiah Taylor previously has said that Ward 250 is "sized to 15 MW thermal."

This tentative number is at odds with NPR's story, which reports that the 456 reactors involved in Project Beehive will "produce around 9.6 gigawatts of power for the data centers and even more thermal heat for other industrial applications," meaning each Valar reactor would be rated at a minimum of 21 MWe-a figure that is significantly higher than any capacity previously ascribed to the design. NPR identified Valar's design as being rated at 25 MWe.

In one more notable wrinkle, this is also not Valar's first plan to bring a nuclear-powered data center to Utah. Shortly after achieving criticality with Ward 250 in late June, the company announced a partnership with Nvidia to jointly develop a much smaller data center in the state. However, Nvidia has not been publicly named, at this time, as an involved party in Project Beehive.