Authored by Lance Christensen via The Epoch Times,
In July, as America turned 250, a reactor the size of a minivan went critical in the red-rock desert of Emery County, Utah.
The company that built it, Valar Atomics, isn’t a Utah company at all. It’s based in El Segundo, California, in the shadow of the aerospace giants that once made Southern California the undisputed capital of American engineering.
But when President Donald Trump challenged American industry to bring a new nuclear reactor to life by Independence Day, Valar didn’t build its test site in California. It built it in Utah. That single fact says more about where these two states are headed than any think tank report could.
I have deep roots in my birthplace of Utah and a considered love for California, the state I have chosen to call home.
So, without picking a winner, we need to ask which state will actually do the work of building the next 50 years of American abundance, and why one of them keeps getting in its own way.
The Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence with the vision of building something more expansive than the servitude they endured for hundreds of years.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” doesn’t happen by accident but can be possible only when a people reject the “multitude of New Offices, and … swarms of Officers [that] harrass [sic] our people, and eat out their substance.”
The men a
