Valar says it met Carbon County and state offices in 2024, initially about making fuels from coal-plant exhaust; a public agenda first named Valar for the Wellington site in Aug 2026

Testing whether the public knew, against what the people involved have said on the record. Officials and Valar: Valar's Max Ukropina told the Trust Lands board that in 2024 he met the Office of Energy Development, the Governor's economic office, SERDA and Carbon County (mine-018); Commissioner Jared Haddock said the county worked with Valar 'since the beginning, when they were looking at other states' (ppl-020); the county's 29 June 2026 letter says the county had worked with Valar for over a year (mine-013); Carbon's October 2024 minutes note that Commissioner Martines phoned in while traveling home from a trip to Idaho National Laboratory connected with the San Rafael lab; no mention of Valar was found in those minutes (csite-026). The New Republic reports that before the May 2025 executive orders Valar staff were exploring land in southern Utah for a first 'gigasite', and the lab director says a contract followed about two weeks after Valar said it wanted to build at the lab; in July 2025 the state called its agreement a non-binding MOU. Public: the state's lease map is dated 9 April 2026 (mine-048); the 20 April 2026 state notice called it an unnamed industrial and power project (csite-032); the first public agenda naming Valar for the site is 10 August 2026 (csite-018); the first ETV News report of the lease that was found came on 18 September, the day after approval. Finding: by the officials' and Valar's own accounts, county, state-agency and regional officials were in contact with Valar about Carbon County from 2024, roughly two years before a public agenda named Valar for the site. The 2024 contacts, as Ukropina described them, concerned making fuels from coal-plant flue gas; when the Wellington parcel itself entered the talks is not settled by the records read (Ukropina's line in the auto-transcript, 'the first property I looked at was actually property', is garbled, mine-018; the state's lease map is dated 9 April 2026; the county's 29 June 2026 letter says it had worked with Valar for over a year). This is a gap in time before public notice, not proof of any intent, and the board's notices met the meeting law's timing (csite-016); no record of what was said in those 2024-2026 contacts was found in public records.

• 2026-08-20 TLA Board of Trustees Meeting Audio Transcript (auto-generated) (Utah Trust Lands Administration (Utah Public Notice Website), 2026-08-20) primary government “We've actually been working with Valor for since the beginning”
• Donald Trump Is Going Nuclear (Colin Jones) (The New Republic, 2026-05-26) news “Valar employees were exploring land in southern Utah”
• Donald Trump Is Going Nuclear (Colin Jones) (The New Republic, 2026-05-26) news “a signed contract was about two weeks”
• Who is Valar Atomics? (Eric Peterson) (The Utah Investigative Journalism Project, 2025-07-08) news “The state has not yet formalized any arrangement for Valar to access state facilities”