Wyoming ‘nuclear renaissance’ new federal reactor license : NPR
Terra Power CEO Chris Levesque joined the Bill Gates-backed company after years of working in the traditional nuclear power industry that he said was slow to innovate.
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Kemmerer, WYO — Wyoming’s infamous wind whips an American flag raised above the construction site of what is only the fourth nuclear reactor to be built in the United States this century, and one of the first in a new generation of advanced designs.
“We’re building an advanced nuclear power plant, but many aspects of the plant and the operation are the same as the sixty-year-old coal plant that’s later,” says Chris Levesque, CEO of Terra Power, pointing west to where the old Naughton plant is located.
Terra Power, based in Washington state and founded by Bill Gates, says it will be the first of many, part of a new nuclear renaissance it wants to bring to longtime energy exporting states like Wyoming. Lévesque says the company’s “advanced reactor” technology makes nuclear power plants safer and faster to build.
“There is an energy crisis, it’s worrying,” says Lévesque.
The recent start of construction here comes amid predictions that a boom in artificial intelligence means data centers in the United States will need about 130 percent more energy by 2030. That’s according to the International Energy Agency.
To meet this demand, big tech companies and the federal government are teaming up to invest billions of dollars in new nuclear power plants.
Nuclear boosters think the problem of NIMBYism is a thing of the past
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Terra Power final approval to begin construction in March. It capped five years of safety studies and demonstrations and the decision to locate the plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming, which won competitive bids over many other Western cities.
“At the start, it’s a completely different story: the communities are fighting over a nuclear power plant,” explains Lévesque. “The old nuclear story was more of a ‘not in my backyard’ story.”
Levesque, who joined Terra Power after a career in the traditional nuclear industry, believes new technologies and the demand for low-emissions energy are changing the game. Almost everything here will be buried underground and they will use liquid sodium instead of water to cool the reactor.
“Steps like this really show people that, yes, this is new technology, but we’re doing it,” he says. “It’s real and people can start incorporating this into their plans.”
If all goes according to plan and the plant is operational by 2031, Terra Power says it will produce enough electricity for a utility to power nearly half a million homes, likely in neighboring Salt Lake City. The company also signed deals with META for several additional reactors to specifically power the tech company’s data centers.
“Since we were selected by the Department of Energy, we have been doing a project for five years that has changed administrations, parties, multiple control of Congress,” Levesque said.
Rocky Mountain States Join Race to Win DOE Nuclear Centers
A recent company press release marking the start of large-scale construction at Kemmerer included quotes praising the project from Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and the state’s entire congressional delegation.
The Department of Energy pilot program that spurred Terra Power’s first project began during the first Trump administration. Then the Biden administration’s infrastructure law funded half of the construction costs, or about two billion dollars.
Republican senators from Wyoming voted against this bill. But the state is eagerly courting nuclear power plants and new uranium mines. The same goes for neighboring Idaho, home to a federal nuclear laboratory, and Utah, where Gov. Spencer Cox recently held a news conference in the arid scrubland west of Salt Lake City.
“If you’re serious about energy abundance, you have to be serious about nuclear power,” Cox said, while unveiling Utah’s bid to become one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new nuclear hubs.
It is billed as a “nuclear life cycle innovation campus” where they would enrich nuclear fuel, recycle it and store its waste, perhaps one day including that generated by the Kemmerer plant.
Cox noted that nuclear already provides about a fifth of all electricity in the U.S. grid.
“This should not be controversial,” said the Republican. “America built the nuclear industry.”
Some environmentalists question the usefulness of green nuclear power
But nuclear power remains controversial, particularly in the West, with its legacy of abandoned uranium mines and radioactive waste, particularly in India. And Salt Lake City was downwind of Cold War-era nuclear weapons testing sites.
“This area has long been considered a sacrifice zone,” says Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of Healthy Environment Alliance Utah, or HEAL.
Skeptical of a nuclear renaissance, Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of the Health Environment Alliance for Utah, is concerned about her state’s proposal to store nuclear waste near the Great Salt Lake.
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Tuddenham is alarmed that Utah wants to site its proposed nuclear center about ten miles from the west shore of the drying Great Salt Lake. She says nuclear is being rebranded green, but that ignores the ongoing problem of where to store its radioactive waste.
“Bill Gates is paying for that first project, and we as taxpayers are paying for that first project as well, I will say,” Tuddenham said. “But what about the next one and the next one? How much are we going to have to pay as taxpayers, as taxpayers, as we go down this path?”
Terra Power says that, like conventional nuclear reactors, its Wyoming plant will store its spent fuel on site until a permanent repository is approved by the federal government. They say it’s safe and that “advanced nuclear” technology produces less waste than existing plants.
An old coal town yearns for a nuclear renaissance
In Wyoming, the nation’s top coal-producing state, one thing that’s not in dispute is that Kemmerer is hungry for any kind of energy boom. When the West Coast divested from coal, national headlines all but called this town of 3,000 people dying.
“That’s what we were concerned about is no longer being an exporter of electricity, because that’s the majority of our jobs,” said Kemmerer Town Administrator Brian Muir.
Kemmerer, Wyoming City Administrator Brian Muir, was hired by the city in 2019 to help find new economic opportunities when, at that time, the coal mine had gone bankrupt and the nearby coal-fired power plant needed to be decommissioned.
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But today, he says there is relief and optimism in the city. Hundreds of qualified jobs are created. Due to the high demand for electricity, the old coal plant is also not closing completely. Some of its generators are being converted to natural gas, which will preserve around 100 existing jobs.
“I will just say that when Bill Gates came here, he talked about our high energy IQs,” Muir said. “We know all forms of energy, their benefits, their costs, their risks and their footprints, and we understand all of this.”
Muir says Kemmerer is already pressuring Terra Power to build a second nuclear power plant here.
