I still remember the first time I drove through Emery County at dusk. The red rock looked almost soft against the sky, and the silence felt absolute. Last July a reactor roughly the size of a minivan went critical in that same landscape. The company that built it sits in El Segundo, California, right where the aerospace giants once defined American engineering. Yet when the challenge went out to bring a new reactor online by Independence Day, the test site landed in Utah. That single decision tells you more about the trajectory of these two states than any glossy report ever could.
I have roots in Utah and a long-standing affection for California, the place I chose to live. So this is not a scoreboard exercise. It is an honest look at which state is actually doing the hard work of building the next half-century of American abundance, and why one of them keeps tripping over its own rules.
Two Deserts, Two Centuries, Two Very Different Paths
The Founders framed independence around the idea of expanding possibility rather than managing scarcity. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness do not appear by accident. They require people willing to reject the constant creation of new offices and the swarms of officers that quietly drain substance from daily life. The same restless energy that pushed settlers westward in the mid-1800s still matters. Utah and California both received those ambitious renegades. They just treated the inheritance differently.
My fourth-great-grandfather dug irrigation canals in the barren Great Salt Lake Valley and set up blacksmith shops when the place still looked impossible. On my wife’s side, the family left Prussia and settled the Central Valley south of Sacramento, wrestling with floods that regularly wiped out farms and towns. Sam Brannan sailed into what was then Yerba Buena, announced the gold discovery on the streets of San Francisco, and decided California’s beauty and location made it the smarter bet. He built towns and became the state’s first millionaire before dying broke. Brigham Young looked over the Wasatch Front and said, “This is the right place,” trusting the desert would eventually blossom. Utah has largely delivered on that promise. Affluence now shows up in almost every corner of the state.
California’s postwar boom was larger in absolute numbers, yet Utah is currently outperforming the deserts of Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Central Valley in the kinds of projects that actually expand capacity. The difference is not geology. It is political will and the structure of permitting.
What the Reactor Choice Really Reveals
Valar Atomics is a California company. Its engineers grew up in the culture that once made Southern California the center of aerospace innovation. When the call went out for a working reactor by the Fourth of July, they chose Utah. The site went from concept to criticality in less than a year. That speed is not an accident of geography. It is the direct result of a regulatory environment that still treats construction as something to be enabled rather than endlessly managed.
In California the same engineers face a permitting and licensing structure built for an earlier era of managed scarcity. Rules shift with every legislative session. Activists can slow or stop projects that would have sailed through in other states. The result is visible: aging nuclear infrastructure declines while new capacity struggles to appear. I have watched colleagues document how energy rules designed decades ago now actively block the very abundance the state claims to want.
Ho Nieh, who has chaired the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, likes to say the country needs more power plants, not more PowerPoints. Utah took the point seriously. California, home to the talent that designed the reactor, seems content to watch from the sidelines while another state does the building.
The Political Gap That Matters More Than Sun or Wind
California still has extraordinary assets. Sunshine, wind corridors, water resources in good years, deep pools of engineering talent, and a rapidly growing artificial intelligence sector all sit inside its borders. None of those advantages can overcome a system that treats every new plant as a potential enemy rather than a tool. The state’s energy framework was written for a time when the goal was to ration rather than expand. That mindset has not kept pace with the demand spikes an AI-driven economy will throw at the grid.
Utah’s current leadership has spent the anniversary year arguing that the pursuit of happiness was never about comfort. It was about character, self-mastery, purpose, and the discipline required to build something larger than oneself. That standard shows up in concrete decisions about land use, licensing timelines, and the willingness to accept that baseload power still matters.
I have found that the cultural difference is easy to feel once you spend time in both places. In one state the conversation still circles around how to make the next project happen. In the other it often circles around how to stop the last one. The second approach feels safer in the short term. It also leaves the long-term work undone.
Why Predictable Rules Beat Constant Reinvention
California does not need to copy Utah. It needs to recover the instincts that once made it the destination for every ambitious builder. That means the legislature has to pass predictable, consistent regulation instead of patching rules that change with the political wind. Public officials need to plan for both steady baseload and the sudden demand jumps that data centers and advanced manufacturing will create. A culture that rewards people willing to meet the mountains rather than rope them off still exists in pockets of the state. It simply no longer sets the dominant tone.
The doom-laced climate rhetoric that treats every power plant as a threat has real costs. It slows the very tools required to keep the lights on while the economy grows. I have watched projects that looked promising on paper die under the weight of process. The engineers leave. The capital leaves. The next generation of capacity appears somewhere else.
Utah’s approach is not perfect. No state gets everything right. Yet the fact that a California company chose the red-rock desert for its first critical reactor is hard to ignore. When the people who design the technology decide the best place to test it is hundreds of miles from home, the message is clear.
The AI Demand Wave Is Already Visible
Artificial intelligence is not a distant prospect. Training runs and inference loads already pull enormous amounts of electricity. Data centers are clustering where power is available, reliable, and relatively free of political friction. States that can deliver both megawatts and permitting certainty will capture the next wave of investment. Those that cannot will watch the jobs and the tax base migrate.
California still has the talent density. It still has the universities and the venture capital. What it lacks is the ability to turn those advantages into operating infrastructure at the speed the market now requires. The gap is not technical. It is administrative and cultural.
In my experience the states that treat energy as a foundation rather than a political football tend to attract the next round of builders. Utah is currently acting like that kind of place. California has the capacity to reclaim the role. Whether it chooses to do so remains an open question.
What an Abundance Agenda Actually Requires
An abundance agenda is not a slogan. It is a set of practical decisions. It means licensing pathways that are clear and time-bound. It means recognizing that intermittent renewables need firm backup if the grid is going to stay stable. It means refusing to let every project become a multi-year negotiation over secondary issues while the primary need for power goes unmet.
Utah demonstrated that a small modular reactor can move from concept to criticality in under a year when the process is designed to enable rather than obstruct. That timeline should not be exceptional. It should become the baseline expectation for projects that meet safety standards.
California could still lead. The engineering culture that once defined the state has not vanished. The capital is still there. The demand is growing. What is missing is the political decision to treat construction as a public good rather than a problem to be managed into submission.
The country needs more power plants, not more PowerPoints.
That line stays with me because it cuts through the noise. Presentations do not keep the lights on. Reactors do. Factories do. Transmission lines do. The states that remember this will shape the next fifty years. The ones that forget it will spend those years explaining why the capacity ended up somewhere else.
Character, Discipline, and the Long Game
Governor Spencer Cox has framed the anniversary year around the idea that the pursuit of happiness was never about ease. It was about the willingness to build something larger than individual comfort. That framing resonates because it matches the historical record. The people who turned the Wasatch Front and the Central Valley into productive landscapes did not wait for perfect conditions. They created the conditions through sustained effort.
California once operated with the same instinct. The aerospace corridor, the early semiconductor industry, the water projects that made the Central Valley possible—all of them required people who accepted risk and complexity as the price of progress. Somewhere along the way the dominant conversation shifted toward risk avoidance and process expansion. The shift is understandable. It is also costly.
I am not arguing for recklessness. Safety standards matter. Environmental review matters. What does not matter is allowing secondary concerns to become permanent barriers to primary needs. When the process itself becomes the product, the actual product never arrives.
Looking Ahead Without Illusions
Two deserts. Two centuries of different choices. One of them is currently hosting new nuclear reactors. The other still has the talent and the resources to do the same work if the political will returns. The race to power the next fifty years of American growth will not be decided by press releases. It will be decided by concrete, steel, and the ability to move from paper to criticality without endless delay.
Utah has shown what is possible when the rules support the work. California retains the ability to match or exceed that performance. Whether it chooses to do so will determine how much of the next wave of investment stays inside its borders. The engineers are watching. The capital is watching. The demand is already here.
The red rock of Emery County now holds a working reactor designed by people who could have stayed home. That fact alone should prompt a serious conversation about what each state is willing to build, and what it is willing to let slip away. The next fifty years will belong to the places that remember how to turn scarcity into abundance through sustained, practical effort. The rest will be left explaining why the reactors, the data centers, and the high-wage jobs appeared somewhere else.
I keep thinking about the silence of that desert at dusk and the quiet hum of a new reactor that was not supposed to be possible on such a short timeline. The contrast between what was achieved and what remains stalled is hard to ignore. The path forward is not mysterious. It is simply hard. And hard work, properly organized, still moves mountains—or at least puts reliable power under them.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how little the underlying geology has changed. The same sun, the same wind patterns, the same rock formations exist on both sides of the state line. What changed is the set of rules and the cultural willingness to use them for construction rather than obstruction. That difference is entirely within human control. It can be reversed. Whether it will be remains the open question that will shape the energy map of the country for decades to come.
The story of these two deserts is still being written. One chapter just closed with a reactor going critical in red rock country. The next chapters will be decided by legislatures, by licensing boards, and by the quiet decisions of engineers and investors about where the next project is most likely to succeed. For now the scoreboard favors the state that treated the challenge as an invitation rather than a threat. The other state still has time to change the outcome. The only question is whether it still wants to.
