Valar’s Project Beehive: 456 reactors × 25 MW = 11.4 GW, but the stated total is 9.6 GW. What explains the gap?
Valar Atomics (Ward 250 went critical in Utah in June under DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program) has proposed Project Beehive: 456 reactors on about 9,000 acres of BLM land near Price, Utah, for a stated 9.6 GW supplying data centers.
A few numbers I couldn’t reconcile:
- Capacity: 456 × 25 MW per unit is 11.4 GW, not 9.6. Is that derating, spares or phasing? I haven’t found an explanation from the company.
- Heat: at roughly 40% thermal-to-electric conversion, 9.6 GW of electricity means about 24 GW of reactor heat, so around 14 GW has to be rejected, in a dry part of Utah. For comparison, the whole state’s average electricity demand in 2024 was about 4 GW.
- Fuel: a generic high-temperature gas reactor benchmark puts a fleet this size at tens of tonnes of HALEU a year. That’s my rough estimate on a generic design, since Valar’s isn’t public, but US HALEU deliveries so far are in the hundreds of kilograms.
Has anyone seen a filing or application that addresses any of these?
Disclosure: I run a small science channel and made a video on this, with all sources in the description: https://youtu.be/WDmuLg4j32U
u/Quick_Register_6227 — 4 days ago