TerraPower, Bill Gates’ nuclear power project in Kemmerer, is officially under construction. That’s thanks to the company clearing a final permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Wyoming Public Radio’s Kamila Kudelska spoke with NPR’s Western correspondent Kirk Siegler, who was there for the windy groundbreaking.
Editor’s Note: This interview was edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Kamila Kudelska: Wyoming Public Media has covered a few groundbreakings for TerraPower at this point. What was this one about? Why was it special?
Kirk Siegler: Well, they had already technically broken ground, to your point, and started construction a few weeks prior. It was interesting being there, though, because I reached out to some of the folks in town that I've been following up with over the years and covering this story, because I think we're in year five of this story, and they didn't even know it was going on. They were kind of like, ‘Groundbreaking? I thought we already went to that.’
Although I will say it was so windy that at the groundbreaking of the construction starting, we didn't get to see a whole lot, because the crane had to be shut down because of the high winds, which I know is not surprising to any of your listeners in Wyoming.
KK: No, it's pretty normal for the spring here. But you beat me to the punch. Can you paint me a scene of the site? What did you see when you were there?
KS: It has a sort of a futuristic vibe. I think a lot of stereotypes and tropes of the nuclear power industry – we think of Springfield and the Simpsons and the old legacy plants. But there's not a whole lot to see just yet.
What has been erected is this enormous testing facility, or it is being built, but it is kind of popping up out of the prairie there. Then, just a smooth 50-acre or so campus where they're smoothing out where they will soon put what they're calling the nuclear island. That's basically the entire plant. Most of it will be underground, making it different, among other reasons, than a conventional nuclear plant.
Of course, when you pivot to the left just a little bit, you can see on the horizon the old coal-fired power plant is still there, and they're actually converting that to natural gas.
When we were originally covering this story, there was often discussion that this was going to replace that plant and actually hook into some of the same infrastructure. That may be true, but of course, things have changed in the energy market lately.
[It was] interesting when you drive in, you have to have an escort. It's high security, probably [like] a construction site of any power plant. The first thing they tell you is [to] make sure you park rear in, which I had to sort of think, ‘Well, this is a nuclear plant and they're saying safety is paramount.’ Nobody had to get a quick getaway. But it kind of struck me as high security, but also big time safety out there in the prairie.
KK: That's interesting.
KS: They're planning to use sodium instead of water to cool the reactor, and that will, they say, among other things be safer, but it's also a more efficient and quicker process to build than legacy nuclear plants that take more than a decade.
KK: You mentioned that they're gonna be using liquid sodium instead of water. Do we know how that will work and how? What kind of safety tests [have they] done in the new tech? I'm more interested in like, can Kemmerer folks sleep easy at night with this in their backyard?
KS: They're insisting this is a safe and proven technology. They spent years testing it. They'll still be testing it on-site. Sodium has a much higher boiling point than water in a conventional nuclear plant, and they point to that. It also creates less radioactive waste that, for now, is going to be stored on site.
There has been a little bit of opposition over the years to this and some skepticism about it, but at least outward facing folks in town are very excited about this and there doesn't seem to be a lot of concern. Folks in Kemmerer are very excited about the prospect of 200 or more long-term skilled labor jobs, not to mention the thousand or so that's expected to be there in the short term for construction.
KK: You mentioned that there's a nearby power plant, that's actually the Naughton Power Plant. It's gonna switch from coal to natural gas, raising some questions for the coal mine that powers it. We've heard from some local leaders that they hope TerraPower can absorb some of these workers in transition. Did you get a sense of that happening?
KS: Well, this has been the promise all along from TerraPower.
It's not totally clear how much retraining will go on if in fact the hundred or so folks at the power plant continue to keep their jobs. A bigger question and a bigger anxiety still in the town is that the coal mine is still the largest employer in Kemmerer.
That's very unknown right now about what's going to happen to that, because of course they're not now supplying the nearby coal-fired power plant and they're searching for new markets. But despite what this administration is trying to do with coal, generally speaking economically, it is not penciling out for a lot of communities right now.
KK: The plant is expected to come online in 2031. Who will use the electricity it makes?
KS: I think it's a little too soon to speculate, but when the company tells me that it's about enough power for 450,000 homes, or close to a half a million homes, what's the nearest city? Well, Salt Lake City. I think it's pretty expected that this plant will start feeding the grid [through] Rocky Mountain Power and likely go to the nearest major metropolitan area.
Now, TerraPower does have other plans to build sort of site specific, pending approval, reactors for data centers themselves. But in this case the energy market is changing so much. Traditionally [you] would build a power plant, hook it right into the grid. But with the proliferation of data centers and AI, a lot of tech companies, seeing the uproar over these energy sucking data centers, are looking for companies such as TerraPower, I'm told, to build specific power plants that can then power the actual data center itself. So we're in a evolving energy market where you're not necessarily building plants these days just to enter the grid.
One big hurdle independent of building all these new plants, if this is really going to happen, is where we're going to get the uranium. Rocky Mountain states, like yours in particular, are eager to kickstart a uranium mining industry, but that comes with a lot of baggage in the West, in particular with radioactive contamination in Native communities and other places. Right now, there isn't an ability, or an easy ability, to process the uranium for the plant. Chris Levesque, the [TerraPower] CEO, told me that this initially will be dependent on a processing facility in South Africa.
There's still a lot of hurdles to getting this kind of technology widespread. But I think it could be a pretty big deal.
