Physicist raises alarm over proposed massive nuclear power project

SALT LAKE CITY — A proposal for a giga-scale industrial project in Carbon County that would be powered by more than 450 nuclear reactors is drawing concern from a Utah physicist.

Dr. Robert Davies, a professor of physics at Utah State University, worries current regulations do not consider the massive thermal footprints facilities like this can leave behind.

"Getting our brains around this scale is really difficult," Davies said. "That's a thermal load that's eight times the entire state of Utah's current electrical demand on this one project."

Davies points out that the proposed 9.6 gigawatt output at full scale for the so-called Project Beehive could result in a thermal output equal to 26 gigawatts, as nuclear power runs at about 40% efficiency in terms of usable power versus power produced. He said regulators need to consider the impact of a concentration of that much heat released over a 9,000-acre area of public lands just north of Wellington.

"I can't even begin to describe how extreme that is in a contained valley," Davies said. "And I've seen no evidence of any kind of thermal analysis. What does that do to the temperatures in the valley?"

Valar Atomics is in the early stages of the project after successfully testing a small reactor in Emery County in June. The test was supported by a presidential executive order, aimed at modernizing nuclear energy testing and national security. The company stated that the newer, small reactor technology is safe and can be cooled with the use of helium, using very little water. Davies, however, worries that the small-scale test is not enough to prove its gradual build to 456 reactors that would power a massive industrial complex that would support data centers, uranium fuel fabrication, water desalination, manufacturing and critical mineral refining.

"There are real questions with the supply chains that are proposed," Davies said. "The technology that's been proposed has not been demonstrated at all on this scale."

But beyond Project Beehive, Davies argues the state of Utah as a whole could be facing a drastic environmental impact over the next decade as roughly a half-dozen mega-scale projects now being proposed statewide are built out.

"I'm not aware that our permitting processes have really been created with these kinds of projects in mind on an individual scale, much less when you start aggregating them in the way that's happening in this state," he said. "This beehive project, these would be among the largest, if not the largest, single-site heat sources on the entire planet. And that includes volcanoes."

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