Valar Atomics Files Plan for 456 Reactors Near Price, Utah

A 9,650-Acre Filing Near Price

Valar Atomics has filed a proposal with federal land managers to build 456 small nuclear reactors across more than 9,000 acres of public land near Price, Utah, plus roughly 650 acres controlled by the state — a project the company calls Project Beehive, as first reported by TechRadar. The company had previously eyed a 10,200-acre site near Green River before dropping it in favor of the Price-area parcel. Each reactor is rated at 25MW and designed in a modular layout, which lets Valar build out the campus in phases as computing demand materializes rather than all at once.

None of the power is intended for Utah households. Valar describes the campus as grid-independent — generating its own electricity to serve data centers and, eventually, industrial heat customers — rather than feeding what it produces into the regional grid.

The Scale Dwarfs Utah's Current Grid

The filing puts total output at roughly 9.6GW, more than twice the 4GW Utah generates on average today. Run continuously, that's enough to power somewhere between 7 and 7.8 million homes at typical U.S. household usage — five to six times the roughly 1.3 million homes that exist statewide. Worth flagging: 456 reactors at 25MW each actually works out to 11.4GW, a 1.8GW gap from the announced 9.6GW figure that the published numbers don't explain. Whether that's a rounding issue, a derating assumption, or a phased buildout target isn't clear from the filing as reported.

For land investors, the math that matters isn't the kilowatt count — it's the footprint. Nearly 10,000 acres of single-use industrial land, with its own fuel manufacturing and on-site waste storage, is a different category of project than anything currently sited in the Uinta Basin or Carbon County corridor. It's closer in scale to a small city's worth of infrastructure than a typical data center campus.

BLM Review Comes Before Anything Gets Built

Nothing moves until the Bureau of Land Management finishes checking the application for completeness and runs it through a NEPA environmental review, which typically opens a public comment period. Valar's own timeline calls for non-nuclear site work to start in late 2026, reactor operations in 2028, and full buildout by 2032 — but that schedule assumes approvals that haven't happened yet. Local groups have already raised concerns about the site's size, its location on public land, and the plan to store nuclear waste on-site alongside industrial activity.

Valar isn't short on capital to pursue the fight: the company raised $1 billion in a Series B led by Sequoia Capital plus another $200 million in credit. But that money capitalizes Valar as a company, not the construction cost of Project Beehive, which hasn't been disclosed. A well-funded applicant doesn't guarantee a fast NEPA process or a favorable outcome — federal environmental review on a project this size, with active local opposition, is more likely to run years than months.

A Speculative Marker for Rural Industrial Land

Price sits in Carbon County, an area better known for coal than data centers, and a filing of this size changes how nearby land gets priced even before a shovel moves. Landowners and speculators tend to price in optionality the moment a project like this becomes public, and brokers covering rural industrial parcels along the US-6 corridor should expect inquiries about adjacent acreage, water rights, and transmission access well ahead of any NEPA decision. At Team Utah Commercial (801-898-8810), we're already getting questions from owners near Carbon County asking what a 9,650-acre power campus does to the value of their parcels, even on land with no direct connection to the project.

The more durable signal here isn't the reactor count — it's that data center developers are now willing to propose generation infrastructure at a scale that outstrips an entire state's current grid, just to secure power certainty. If BLM review drags into 2028 or beyond, watch for competing or copycat filings elsewhere in Utah's sparsely populated counties, where federal land is abundant and local zoning friction is lower than in the Wasatch Front.

Source: this analysis discusses reporting by techradar.com.