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Fact loc-011

newanalysisconfirmed The local paper: 47 ETV items on Valar from July 2025; a Carbon plan ran in 2025, the site only after the vote
2026-09-29 · loc-011 · ETV News, Emery Telcom, Valar Atomics, Utah San Rafael Energy Lab

ETV News describes itself as a free weekly delivered to every home and business in Carbon and Emery counties (circulation 13,800), with a website and cable channels that air government meetings; its contact address is at emerytelcom.com. The two other local papers' sites (Sun Advocate, Emery County Progress) did not answer (sources_not_read). ETV's search feed for 'valar' returned 48 items: 47 from 3 July 2025 to 23 September 2026 and one unrelated 2017 column; 46 of the 47 name Valar in their text and one (a 25 February 2026 Carbon Commission report) refers to the Emery reactor without naming the company. All 47 were checked. Two 2025 items told readers the plan was bigger than one test reactor: the 17 September 2025 state release on the groundbreaking ended with Valar's description of itself as building 'gigasites' of thousands of reactors, and a 10 October 2025 article reported that Valar's 'current plan' was a manufacturing hub in Carbon County after about three years (loc-034); neither named a site. The first report of the Wellington lease is dated 18 September 2026, the day after the vote (mine-041); no earlier item links Valar to Wellington, the Section 16 trust land or a Carbon lease (two earlier items mention trust land in other contexts: 640 acres across the road from the Emery lab, 9 April 2026, and a Farm Bureau speaker on the Trust Lands permit process for solar, 1 May 2026). Six items are press releases printed as articles: from the state lab (23 Jan and 23 Sept 2026), from Valar (24 Feb 2026), from the Office of Energy Development (17 Sept 2025, orig-067), from USU Eastern (26 Mar 2026) and from Southern Utah University (19 Sept 2026). Most of the rest are meeting reports. Residents' concerns appear in them (the June 2025 county hearing on nuclear, the April 2026 land-sale hearing, a resident's data-center presentation in July 2026, a candidate forum where one candidate called nuclear the most expensive source), but no ETV item read quotes an independent expert assessing Valar's reactor or its safety. ETV's post-vote article (18 Sept) reports the lease terms and supporters' remarks and notes that permits are still needed; it reports no opposing comment, which matches the hearing record (mine-014).

In plain termsThe one newspaper that reaches every home in both counties wrote about Valar 47 times in fourteen months. In 2025 it did tell readers that Valar aimed at clusters of thousands of reactors and planned a factory hub in Carbon County, but no article read named the Wellington site before the day after the state approved it. Much of its coverage was the company's and the state lab's own announcements, printed as news. Readers relying on it could have known a Carbon County plan existed, but not where or when, until it was decided.
verified 2026-09-29: Re-read the feed (all three pages) and the item pages. The count of 47 holds, but one item does not name Valar. Correction: 'none named the Carbon site before the vote' holds for the site, but the analysis had missed that ETV reported a Valar plan for a Carbon County manufacturing hub on 10 Oct 2025 and printed the 'gigasites' description on 17 Sept 2025; both added. Trust-land wording made exact. Correction 2026-09-29 (wording review): absence stated as 'no article read'.

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