Utah Senate leader hopes microreactors can help make the state ‘one of the nuclear headquarters for the world’

Stuart Adams’ dream to make Utah “one of the nuclear headquarters for the world” could put a small nuclear reactor in your community.

Adams is the chair of the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, a state agency tasked with developing military-owned land in Utah. MIDA is working with the Utah National Guard to develop 27 properties, spanning over 24,000 acres across the state, that are currently owned by the Utah State Armory Board.

At a meeting of the MIDA board on Nov. 7, the Utah Senate president suggested building microreactors on the properties, called “project areas” in the board’s planning documents.

“Those microreactors can be built off-site, dropped off on-site, and up and running with very little permitting,” he said, after noting he has visited the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, which is helping to test the devices.

“We’re hoping to get it … out toward the Tooele or Dugway area,” Adams said. “We’re hoping that these project areas help us with making Utah one of the nuclear headquarters for the world here, as we try to produce power and solve the AI need for data centers and power. Kind of exciting to see this happen.”

A spokesperson for MIDA said this week that there are no final plans for how to develop the armory sites.

Microreactors are small, portable and can generate up to 20 megawatts of thermal energy that can be used to provide electricity or heat, according to the Idaho National Laboratory. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that one megawatt of electricity can power about 1,000 homes.

The revenue generated by developing the armory properties — via tax revenues from projects like the small reactors or other commercial ventures — will fund new facilities the Utah National Guard needs, according to a final plan from the two entities.

Revenues will be used to plan, design and construct a new gate, access control point and training center at Camp Williams, and a National Guard training site near Lehi, and a new hangar and more aviation infrastructure near Cedar City to assist state response to wildfires and other emergencies, the plan explains.

The Idaho National Laboratory, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to research innovations in nuclear energy, reports that it expects to start testing the first microreactors in 2025.

Remote, rural communities that truck or fly in diesel to run generators for power, the lab says, can especially benefit from the factory-built, on-site microreactors, which are small enough to transport by truck.

Except for one project area at Camp Williams in Bluffdale — which is owned in part by the federal government — all of the initial 25 sites are owned by the Utah State Armory Board. The sites are non-contiguous parcels around the state.

But when Tooele leaders learned the armory site in their city was slated for development, they realized it was adjacent to two underutilized parcels owned by Tooele City Corporation. After public meetings, the council unanimously voted to include the city’s parcels in MIDA’s project.

Taxes the parcels could earn would create an economic benefit to the community, MIDA’s plan noted.

For Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of the nonprofit Healthy Environment Alliance (HEAL) of Utah, Adams’ enthusiasm for the small reactors reminds her of another nuclear project, which failed last year. “We’ve heard this sort of over-promising before,” she said.

In November 2023, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems gave up on its plan to power 27 Utah communities with small nuclear reactors by 2029.

For the endeavor, called the Carbon Free Power Project, UAMPS had partnered with NuScale, a company that planned to build and operate the reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory. But UAMPS and NuScale couldn’t find enough cities or utilities to commit to the plan.