PRICE, Utah — More than 100 people crowded into the Carbon County Planning Commission meeting on a Tuesday afternoon, all to hear from a company that wants to build small nuclear reactors that could power data centers.
"It affects all of our homes, all of our property values, all of our way of life, and it just absolutely changes what we moved out here for,” said Jill Ison, who lives near Wellington.
Part of the reason this many people came to this particular meeting was to hear a presentation from a nuclear energy company called Valar Atomics that builds advanced small modular reactors that could power data centers in the future.
"We both design the reactor, build the reactor, and go and find communities to build it in," CEO of Valar Atomics, Isaiah Taylor, said. "We build it there and actually we go all the way to operating it there."
At this meeting, the Valar Atomics team said it wanted to build a couple hundred reactors on a 640-acre parcel of land managed by SITLA, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration.
However, NPR obtained documents a week ago that said Valar was planning to build more than 400 reactors on 9,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land.
The company said they are in the process of getting access to BLM land in the area.
"The BLM Land, the way to think about this is sort of an eventual phase 2 of what we want to do here," Taylor said. "We're not through the BLM process yet. There's a lengthy process to actually getting access to that BLM land, which we are in the very early stages of."
Representatives from Valar Atomics said they couldn't comment when we tried to ask them further questions and said they had to be somewhere else.
During their presentation, they did talk about using their reactors to power data centers and why they believe that would benefit the community.
"They are an industrial project that provides jobs, a pretty incredible tax revenue, a really, really awesome tax revenue, with actually quite a low burden on public services,” Taylor said.
While some people we spoke to said they're not against development, they question why Valar wants to build specifically in this area.
"Why doesn't Valar take a look at some of the areas in other parts of this state that are desolate, where ranchers aren't running their cattle, there's no alkali flats, salt flats, that don't have much in the way of use,” Leo Hardy, who lives near Wellington, said.
Because this meeting was just a presentation, there wasn't a decision as to whether Valar Atomics could go ahead and build. Representatives only said if they do get permission, they'd just break ground sometime next year.