Rural towns provide land, workforce and a unique energy supply to support a new type of nuclear power plant

The Natrium facility divides nuclear and nonnuclear sections of the plant, which leads to more
reliable energy output at lower cost. (TerraPower design graphic)

TerraPower plans to build smaller nuclear power plants in declining coal towns across the U.S., and it needs land, a reliable workforce, and a uniquely enriched uranium to get the job done. Rural towns more than 1,500 miles apart will provide all three for the first reactor.

Kemmerer, Wyoming, is providing the site, many of the workers, and infrastructure supports for TerraPower's first power plant, called Natrium, which recently became "the first new commercial reactor to receive federal approval in nearly a decade," reports Brad Plumer for The New York Times.

The federal permit allows the company to begin construction on Natrium's nuclear components. "The company had already broken ground on the site in 2024 and had begun building the non-nuclear parts of the plant," Plumer explains. Natrium is slated to go online in 2031, just a couple of years before the town's coal plant is expected to be retired.

The plant's designs are novel and will allow smaller, less expensive reactors to be built; however, when the company broke ground on its Kemmerer plant, it didn't have an American supplier for the reactor's unique enriched Uranium known as HALEU.

At the time, only Russia was making HALEU. As TerraPower searched for a solution, a uranium enrichment facility in the rural town of Piketon, Ohio, said it could step up to produce HALEU before the reactor went online.

TerraPower is now "partnering through a memorandum of understanding with Centrus, a company in Ohio, that will likely be the first in the U.S. to make the fuel on a commercial scale," reports of Caitlin Tan of Wyoming Public Radio.