In Kemmerer, a small town in southwest Wyoming, the coal era is slowly ending.<\/p>\n
For generations, a nearby power plant burned coal to light the region.<\/p>\n
Trains of coal fed its furnaces for the better part of a century.<\/p>\n
Now that plant is winding down, and something stranger is rising beside it.<\/p>\n
The new machine runs on liquid metal instead of water<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It will store its energy in a giant tank of hot molten salt<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And it can flex its output<\/strong> up and down like a battery.<\/p>\n For a town built on coal, it is a leap into the future<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The old and the new now stand side by side on the same plain.<\/p>\n Kemmerer is home to only about 2,600 people.<\/p>\n Right next door sits the Naughton plant, which burned coal for decades.<\/p>\n Its stacks are a familiar sight on the wide Wyoming horizon.<\/p>\n As that coal plant retires, a company called TerraPower is moving in<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The firm was founded by Bill Gates<\/strong> to build a new kind of reactor.<\/p>\n Its plant here is named Kemmerer Unit 1, after the town itself.<\/p>\n It is the first advanced reactor<\/strong> of its kind to break ground in the country.<\/p>\n The builders chose a coal town on purpose.<\/p>\n The workers, the grid lines, and the know how were already in place<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A community that knew energy work would not have to start from scratch.<\/p>\n Almost every reactor running today is cooled by ordinary water.<\/p>\n That water has to sit under crushing high pressure<\/strong> to keep from flashing to steam.<\/p>\n The Natrium reactor takes a very different path.<\/p>\n It borrows an idea first tested in reactors decades ago.<\/p>\n It uses liquid sodium to carry heat out of the core.<\/p>\n Sodium is a soft metal that melts into a flowing silver liquid<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It can run blazing hot while staying near normal air pressure<\/strong>.<\/p>\n That removes the need for a giant dome to hold back steam.<\/p>\n The whole system can run hot and calm at the same time.<\/p>\n Engineers see the swap as a simpler cooler design<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The reactor makes heat around the clock, day and night.<\/p>\n But the grid does not always need that power right away.<\/p>\n So the plant sends the extra heat into a huge tank of molten nitrate salt<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The salt soaks up the warmth and holds it like a thermos.<\/p>\n Nothing is lost while the plant waits for the right moment.<\/p>\n When demand spikes, that stored heat is released on command<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It boils water, spins extra turbines, and pours out more power<\/strong>.<\/p>\n In effect, the reactor charges and discharges like a giant thermal battery<\/strong>.<\/p>\n That flexibility is exactly what the modern grid craves.<\/p>\n Wind and sun come and go, and this reactor can fill the gaps.<\/p>\n The scale of the plan only lands once the figures come out.<\/p>\n On a normal day, the reactor produces 345 megawatts of power<\/strong>.<\/p>\n When the grid screams for more, the salt lets it surge to 500.<\/p>\n That extra headroom is stored heat, not extra fuel in the core.<\/p>\n It can hold that 500 megawatt burst<\/strong> for more than five hours.<\/p>\n The whole project carries a price tag near four billion dollars<\/strong>.<\/p>\n About half of that comes from the Department of Energy<\/a>.<\/p>\n In March 2026, it won the first construction permit<\/strong> the country has ever granted a reactor like it.<\/p>\n Ground was broken in 2024<\/a>, with first power aimed at 2030.<\/p>\n Each step has landed as a milestone for the whole nuclear industry.<\/p>\n For Kemmerer, the biggest promise is jobs.<\/p>\n Building the plant will take about 1,600 workers<\/strong> at its peak.<\/p>\n Running it afterward will need around 250 permanent staff<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Many of those roles fit the skills of former coal and power crews.<\/p>\n An operator who ran a boiler can be retrained for a turbine hall.<\/p>\n Still, a first of its kind machine carries real unproven risk<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The special fuel it needs has been hard to secure<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Cost and schedule on nuclear projects have a long history of slipping.<\/p>\n Whether this one holds its budget will shape what gets built after it.<\/p>\n Like the towers of an offshore wind<\/a> farm, the payoff arrives only years later.<\/p>\n It is the same long bet as a fox pushed off its den by solar panels<\/a>, a gain today weighed against a cost tomorrow.<\/p>\n In the end, for a town that ran on coal, the reactor is a daring second act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Kemmerer, a small town in southwest Wyoming, the coal era is slowly ending. For generations, a nearby power plant burned coal to light the region. Trains of coal fed its furnaces for the better part of a century. Now that plant is winding down, and something stranger is rising beside it. The new machine … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":31353,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"coal plant site","rank_math_title":"An old coal town in Wyoming is getting a 4 billion dollar reactor cooled by liquid sodium, and a tank of molten salt lets it surge from 345 to 500 megawatts like a giant battery","rank_math_description":"TerraPower's Natrium reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming replaces a retired coal plant with liquid-metal nuclear power and built-in molten salt energy storage. H","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A town built on coal becomes a nuclear first<\/h2>\n
The reactor that runs on liquid metal<\/h2>\n
A tank of salt that acts like a battery<\/h2>\n
The numbers behind the promise<\/h2>\n
The coal workers and what must still be proven<\/h2>\n