A view of the main street of Kemmerer, Wyoming, where the population will double during peak times during reactor construction (Kenneth Hynek / CC BY 2.0)
Kemmerer, a small town in Wyoming in the northwestern United States, could be uphill.
The coal-fired power plant in this community of roughly 2,600 residents is slated to close in 2025, but last month the nuclear development company TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, announced it had chosen Kemmerer as the preferred location for its multi-billion dollar demonstration project, its sodium reactor Construction will employ around 2,000 construction workers at the peak of the project over the next seven years.
The plant will have a 345 MW sodium-cooled high speed reactor with an energy storage system on molten salt. The storage technology can increase the system’s output to 500 MW if required, which corresponds to the energy required to power 400,000 households. As a demonstration system, it is intended to prove the design, construction and operating properties of sodium technology.
It will be built on or near Kemmerer’s soon-to-be-decommissioned Naughton coal-fired power station to take advantage of existing cooling water inlets and power distribution infrastructure.
“On behalf of Kemmerer and the surrounding communities, we are delighted and happy to host the sodium demonstration project,” said Bill Thek, Mayor of Kemmerer. “This is great for Kemmerer and great for Wyoming.”
Under the Biden government’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, the US Department of Energy (DOE) plans to invest more than $ 1.5 billion in the Kemmer sodium facility to aid licensing, construction and demonstration. This sum will be topped up by TerraPower.
According to Alice Caponiti, assistant assistant secretary for advanced reactors in the US government’s Office for Nuclear Energy, the DOE is “extremely excited about this project,” which it called the “first reactor of its kind.”
“Sodium will be the first commercial reactor ever in the state of Wyoming and one of the first advanced reactors in the United States,” she wrote.
“Hundreds of workers are required to manufacture complex parts and components, thousands of skilled construction workers are required to build the nuclear and energy islands, and hundreds of plant operators, maintenance teams and security personnel are required full-time to operate.” World, ”she added.
Terrapower wants the facility to be operational for the next seven years, but it is subject to final location agreements and appropriate approval, licensing and support. The company plans to file a building permit application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in mid-2023.
In addition to sodium, two more advanced reactors are expected to be in operation in the northwest region. X-energy announced plans to build its Xe-100 reactor in Washington state, and NuScale plans to operate its first advanced small modular light water reactor system at the Idaho National Laboratory, making this US region the new hub of nuclear innovation.
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