Cindy O’Neil understands the boom-and-bust cycles of industry. Her husband spent years working in Carbon County’s namesake coal mines. In this pocket of central Utah, energy and the economy have long been intrinsically linked, at great sacrifice to county residents.

“We’ve had the coal. We’ve dealt, the whole community, with black lung,” O’Neil said. ​“The explosions, the fires, and all the things that came along with it.”

But a new industry and type of energy production is about to move near her rural home. And she says it has her and her neighbors even more worried than they were about the dangers that came from their long history with coal.

“It’s all descending, these data centers,” said O’Neil, who tracks mysterious new projects in the works and shares updates on Facebook community pages. ​“They’re setting these things within a couple of miles of homes.”

Her latest updates involve a lot of chatter about Valar Atomics, a nuclear startup. The company plans to build a mega-complex of 456 small modular reactors — a still largely untested and unproven technology in the United States — on the vast tracts of Bureau of Land Management land in the county. The project will store radioactive waste, according to a report from National Public Radio, and power an array of industrial activities, including data centers. ​“Project Beehive” has support from the state of Utah, and will include a square mile of state-owned trust lands.

Another data center complex planned for the county, Altigen Energy’s ​ “ Jurassic Spark,” will cover hundreds of acres and include a massive natural gas plant.

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