A private company wants to lease 9,000 acres of public land in Utah for a project involving 456 nuclear reactors. The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing the application. This has never been done before. The company, Valar Atomics, isn't starting from zero. Utah's Trust Lands Administration already approved a separate lease for part of this same project, a square mile of state land, for up to 100 years. Together the site would hold the reactors, a nuclear fuel production facility, and a nuclear waste storage site. All of it on land that's supposed to belong to the public. Carbon County residents say they weren't told until it was already underway. The county has defended using non-disclosure agreements to land the deal. A local physics professor says the valley's geography could trap the heat these reactors throw off. The Department of Energy already used a "categorical exclusion" to approve the test reactor behind this project. No environmental assessment. No impact statement. No public comment period at all. Valar Atomics has built and run exactly one test reactor. It powered a single computer chip. Now they want 456, built at industrial scale. The company's founder has no nuclear engineering background. Nuclear engineers have already publicly disputed the company's safety claims. And Valar hasn't even submitted a design to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they're suing the NRC instead, over the safety rules they'd have to follow. 456 nuclear reactors don't belong next to a town that never got a vote, and it's time to make your voice heard. Petition is in the first reply. #DemsUnited

Burgum is pushing another federal land swap at Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia, just like the one at Yosemite. Both use the same move: hand federal park land to private interests, funded in part by the Land and Water Conservation Fund, money meant for conservation. Two wealthy families want to trade land with the Park Service so they can build up to 15 private homes, some up to 15,000 sq ft, inside wilderness Congress said in 1972 must stay "permanently preserved in its primitive state." It's loggerhead sea turtle nesting ground, home to 30% of Georgia's total, plus four other protected sea turtle species, red knots, and piping plovers. A watchdog group had to FOIA the draft deed terms just to see them. Georgia's own Camden County Commission wouldn't endorse the deal. A former Yosemite superintendent called that deal "so ridiculous, it makes you sick." Here's the mechanism. The Land and Water Conservation Fund exists specifically to buy and protect public land, funded by offshore oil and gas royalties, as an environmental offset for that drilling. Burgum's Interior has been trying to redirect that same money away from buying conservation land and toward "deferred maintenance" instead. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) says that diversion is illegal and expects it to get sued over. So the fund meant to protect land from exactly this kind of loss is being hollowed out, then tapped again to help pay private developers to take park land in the first place. This isn't one bad deal. It's a pattern. How many other national parks does this admin have waiting in the pipeline, ready to be sliced off to private interests? Tell NPS this shouldn't move forward funded by conservation dollars it was never meant to touch. We don't have much time. Link is in the first reply. #DemsUnited

🚨 On Monday, Indigenous Peoples' Day, thousands of saguaros the Tohono O'odham consider people will be ripped out of the ground, for not one wall, but two. The saguaros are called ha:şañ. Removing one isn't just destroying a plant, it's considered an act of violence against a person. The Nation was only notified Friday. The Nation filed an emergency injunction with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this week trying to stop it. Removing a saguaro without a permit is illegal. DHS is moving forward anyway, citing a border emergency to bypass that requirement. Chairman Verlon Jose put it plainly: "Trespassing on our land to remove the sacred saguaros is like having masked men break into your house and take away your children.” But here's what you can do today. There's a way to speak up on this exact project. It's in the first reply. #DemsUnited 🧵