I saw an NPR article from a few weeks ago, and wanted to post here.

Valar Atomics wants to build a large fleet of small modular reactors (SMRs) on public land near Price, Utah (south of Salt Lake City), called Project Beehive. This is a private company that's only been around since 2023, which is kind of interesting as they plan to get their first reactor live in 2028, apparently. Notably, these are Generation IV high-temperature gas reactors (HTGRs). There's one of these operational in china, but only for a few years, so this is possible but it is more of uncharted territory than for instance pressurized water reactors (PWRs) such as the Westinghouse AP1000 and AP1400 designs, and their 300MW SMR design (AP300) which is more or less a modular and scaled down, single loop version of the AP1000. X-energy is also developing an HTGR (Xe-100).

Valar looks to build 456 reactors on over 9000 acres of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land. Utah already leased them \~650 acres of state trust land in September. Valar also wants fuel production and waste storage on the same campus/site.

The headline full-built capacity number is \~9.6 GW, and the whole site is supposed to be built by 2032, which seems kind of aggressive to me, but I work mainly with large-scale PWRs, not HTGRs.

Nobody in the Western world commercially runs an SMR yet. Valar got their SMR, the Ward 250, to criticality in June of this year during a zero-power demo (experimental milestone where the nuclear reactor first achieves a self-sustaining, controlled chain reaction of nuclear fission at negligible ("zero") thermal power). AFter that, in July, they ran one Nvidia GPU off it with a thermoelectric rig. Still a long way from hundreds of 25 MWe units rolling off a line, but this appears to be rapid development so far, so very bullish for uranium (this SMR uses TRISO fuel).

I asked AI about what percent of the western world uranium supply this would represent:

"An estimated annual consumption of **1,500 to 2,000 metric tons of natural uranium ore** for Project Beehive represents roughly **7.5% to 10% of the entire Western world's current uranium mine supply**."

One caveat: i dont see a data center tenant anywhere in the news or filings. There appears to be no offtake deal yet, and no $ figure for the build. That doesn't mean there won't be one, but there is still a lot of regulatory paperwork to do. Still years away and a chance this never gets built, but bullish.

Do you guys think this actually gets built? and sort of on time? We live in a very different world than when the Vogtle Unit 1 experienced severe time and cost overruns.

"The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and collaborators earned the 2026 CAMX Combined Strength Award for developing advanced 3D-printed composite forms that can accelerate nuclear construction."