Utah's dubious destiny in nuclear power development
Union Electric Callaway Nuclear Power Plant in Missouri. (Photo by)
In February, 2025, in remarks delivered to the Nuclear Industry Council's showcase in Salt Lake City, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox outlined Utah's future as a national leader in nuclear power development: 'We believe that Utah is uniquely positioned to lead the nuclear renaissance in the U.S.'
At a conference in Park City in October 2024, Utah Senate President Stuart J. Adams went Cox one better and said, 'We want to establish Utah as an expert here for energy innovation . . . we want to be the world leader. And to do that, nuclear is going to be a big part of it.' Another Utah politician eyeing the moon while jumping on a pogo stick, Utah Congressional Rep. John Curtis (now Utah Senator) said at the same Park City venue, 'We want to be a big part of this. We're ready for nuclear facilities here in our state.' Unclear about referencing the state or the nation, he also said, 'We're not talking about dozens of nuclear facilities. We're talking about hundreds of nuclear facilities.'
Utahns have heard this before — big promises, big plans, out-of-this-world expectations, and fizzling results. A parade of top Utah leaders have long excelled in making thrilling predictions about the state.
For example, a Utah attorney in 1976 promised to sweep corrupting long-term power out of Utah's future. Orrin Hatch criticized then-incumbent Senator Frank Moss' 18-year tenure in the Senate, saying, 'What do you call a Senator who's served in office for 18 years? You call him home.' Hatch argued Moss had lost touch with his constituents after so long a time gulping down the muddy waters of the Potomac River.
Orrin Hatch won the election that year and promptly lost touch with his constituents for the next 42 years as he became the longest running elected U.S. Senator up to that time, serving seven six-year terms in office. His treacherous contribution to the political landscape helped to lay the basis of the Senate's current House of Lords-style lifetime service model, devoted primarily to serving the interests of an autocratic occupant of the White House rather than the people of this country.
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt made promises and predictions during his 11 years in office about education that neither he nor the Legislature could bring to pass: reducing class sizes, raising up students in poor areas of the state, and improving educational achievement by handing out special grants to 'Centennial' schools. He and the state could not manage to improve the state's ranking of dead last in per student spending among the 50 states. Furthermore, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores under Leavitt slid backward for 5th and 8th graders.
The aforementioned Utah Senate President Stuart Adams glibly promised the people of Utah that Utah would lead the nation out of the pandemic. However, Utah, with all its anti-vax religious libertarians leading the way, arguably led Utah and the nation back into another round of pandemic illness and death.
Now, along comes Gov. Spencer Cox in the prime of his fame and power in 2025. It seems to have slipped the governor's mind that Utah was the recipient of drifting nuclear mushroom clouds during the atom bomb testing beginning in 1945 at the Nevada Test Site. This tidy little underperformed piece of history produced an American Chernobyl with cascading cancer deaths from generation to generation as a result of the 'downwinder' effect on southern Utahns.
Cox also seems not to have taken to heart another nuclear warning story that comes to us from Utah's west desert. That part of the state is a holding place for some of the US military's deadliest materials. One article cites, 'Everything from compacted urban trash to nuclear reactor waste seems to end up there among the tumbleweeds, alkaline salt flats, and jackalopes. Even the Deseret News once called it 'a place to store and burn and bury our country's toxic trash.'' The Dugway Proving Ground located there became one of the centers of the nation's chemical and biological weapons testing and a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Dugway ran into trouble in 1968 when testing a new nerve agent that accidentally killed 6,000 sheep grazing in the desert.
In another slap to the face of Utah's megalomaniacal ambitions is that Utah is not even mentioned in the short list of states who are leading the way in developing nuclear energy, a list which includes only Virginia, Michigan, and Wyoming.
It is hard to know from what source Utah politicians are taking their delirious political prompts. It certainly is not necessary in an authentic democracy to always be first and best in everything.
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