Bill Gates’ TerraPower builds its first nuclear reactor in a coal

TerraPower, a start-up co-founded by Bill Gates to revolutionize designs for nuclear reactors, has picked Kemmerer, Wyoming, as the preferred location for its first demonstration reactor. It aims to build the plant in the frontier-era coal town by 2028.

Constructing the plant will be a job bonanza for Kemmerer, with 2,000 workers at its peak, said TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque in a video call with reporters on Tuesday.

It will also provide new clean-energy jobs to a region dominated today by the coal and gas industry. Today, a local power plant, coal mine, and natural gas processing plant combined provide more than 400 jobs — a sizeable number for a region that has only around 3,000 people.

“New industry coming to any community is generally good news,” Kemmerer Mayor William Thek told CNBC. “You have to understand, most of our nearby towns are 50 miles or more from Kemmerer. Despite that, workers travel those distances every day for work in our area.”

For TerraPower, picking a location was a matter of geological and technical factors, like seismic and soil conditions, and community support, said Levesque.

Once built, the plant will provide a baseload of 345 megawatts, with the potential to expand its capacity to 500 megawatts.

For reference, one gigawatt or 1,000 megawatts of energy will power a mid-sized city, and a small town can operate on about one megawatt, according to a rule of thumb Microsoft co-founder Gates provided in his recent book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” The United States uses 1,000 gigawatts and the world needs 5,000 gigawatts, he wrote.

It will cost about $4 billion to build the plant, with half of that money coming from TerraPower and the other half from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.

“It’s a very serious government grant. This was necessary, I should mention, because the U.S. government and the U.S. nuclear industry was, was falling behind,” said Levesque.

“China and Russia are continuing to build new plants with advanced technologies like ours, and they seek to export those plants to many other countries around the world,” Levesque said. “So the U.S. government was concerned that the U.S. hasn’t been moving forward in this way.”

Once built, it should provide power for 60 years, Levesque said.

The Kemerrer plant will be the first to use an advanced nuclear design called Natrium, developed by TerraPower with GE-Hitachi.

Natrium plants use liquid sodium as a cooling agent instead of water. Sodium has a higher boiling point and can absorb more heat than…