The Itch

There is a certain kind of knowing that doesn't come from a book. It comes from a funeral. From watching a doctor explain something to your family in a voice too quiet for the hallway. From standing in a kitchen while someone from the county reads a letter that changes what next year looks like.

Carbon County, Utah, knows things that way. Has for a long time.

For readers who've never lived in a coal town, here's the short version: Carbon County named itself after what it pulled out of the ground, and for generations that thing paid the bills and extracted its fee accordingly. Black lung. Explosions. Fires underground. The mines are closed now, have been since 2023. The seams went thin, the market went elsewhere, and the county was left holding the bill without the income to pay it.

So you would think, having been through all that, the place might get a minute.

No.

What's heading for Carbon County now is 456 small modular nuclear reactors, none of which have ever been commercially deployed anywhere in the United States. A company called Valar Atomics wants to build them on federal land under a project called Beehive. I will say this for the name: calling a nuclear installation after something that stings you is at least honest. The plan doesn't stop at reactors, either. There's uranium fuel processing, steel manufacturing, mineral refining, water desalination, and power for data centers, all of it stacked onto land sitting a couple miles from people's homes.

Down the road from that, another company called Altigen wants to build a natural gas complex on 1,200 acres. Could eventually put out three gigawatts of electricity. The entire state of Utah uses about four. One complex. One county. For servers that hum in buildings and never say thank you.

Now let me take a short turn before I get back to the main road.

Big Earl at the grain elevator in Chamberlain's Bend has this habit of reading the commodity sheets every morning like they contain the secret to something, and then reading scripture on Sunday like it might have updated since last week. He told me once, from a position of authority I can only describe as "perched on an overturned bucket with terrible coffee," that the trouble with any boom is that whoever's selling it always needs something back that they haven't brought up yet. The corn price goes up, and the seed price goes up more. Earl says the only person who gets genuinely excited about a boom is the one who doesn't have to live near it.

Pastor Holmgren nodded at this, which surprised me, given that he usually saves his wisdom for Sundays and his pettiness for the euchre table. He's still not over a hand Earl played in April.

The point being: Carbon County's commissioners are not wrong that they need the revenue. Coal's collapse shifted the tax burden onto homeowners and whatever businesses are left. The Valar lease could bring $35 million over 50 years for schools. That is real, and I'm not going to wave it away.

But here is the part that's been sitting in my back teeth like a popcorn hull.

Commissioner Larry Jensen said at a public meeting that there are "a few" in the community who push back, but the "silent majority" are the ones he's there to represent. Cheryl Lupo went door to door collecting 300 signatures to get on the ballot as an independent commission candidate. She said the opinions she heard, house by house, ran toward torches and pitchforks. Three hundred signatures in a county that size is not a few. And the silent majority has a way of turning up loudest in the mouths of people who've already made up their minds.

Then there's the secrecy. Nondisclosure agreements, signed before the community was told what was being discussed. The county's own statement acknowledged that without the agreements, some companies would choose not to explore projects there. Cindy O'Neil, whose husband worked those mines, whose family knows what the county's generosity has cost, said you shouldn't hide what you're planning to bring to a community until it's a done deal.

She's right. Whatever the project, whatever the promise, you don't start a relationship with a town by keeping it in the dark. The secrecy tells you more than the brochure does.

Cheryl Lupo's mother died at 38. Lupo believes it was fallout drifting east from Nevada nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. Her grandfather, too. Carbon County's sense of what nuclear means didn't come from a textbook. It came from the same place all its knowing came from.

Aspen Westenskow is worried about heat. The Wellington area sits in a valley, hemmed in by the Wasatch Range to the west and the Book Cliffs to the north and east. A physics professor at Utah State has noted that small modular reactors produce more waste heat per unit of electricity than gas plants because they run less efficiently. Clear the land, lose the trees, and you have a bowl that holds heat instead of releasing it.

She's worried about water, too. Every drop in the region is already claimed. The companies say closed-loop cooling. Mike Nelson, board chair of the Trust Lands Administration, said at a public meeting that they "weren't always sure what to ask about" and "probably still aren't sure of everything to ask about because this is a first."

Four hundred and fifty-six reactors. A first.

Cindy O'Neil put it plain. She said they don't have to take the table scraps.

A place that gave its lungs to an industry, buried its miners, raised their children, and kept going has earned the right to ask questions. To hold out for real answers. To say no if the math doesn't add up and the company needs a secrecy agreement just to start the conversation.

The thing about people who've already paid the full price once is that they know what the bill looks like. They can feel it coming. The scars don't forget.

That's not stubbornness. That's education. And when trouble is close, it itches.

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