KEMMERER—Because of high winds, Andy Chrusciel joked that he kept his construction helmet cranked so tight it gave him a headache. Walking around the site of the Natrium nuclear power plant, even that painful setting wasn’t enough to keep the hat atop his head — the construction manager raised a hand to pin it down.
Vulnerable headgear wasn’t the only casualty of Wyoming gales that ripped across the Green River Basin on Wednesday.
The winds were also temporarily complicating a much-anticipated construction project that’s now officially underway. Specifically, crews have started to prep the site where Wyoming’s first nuclear power plant is going — at the tip of the Wyoming Range just south of Kemmerer. The crane and the smaller lifts had even been lowered for the day because of the wind, explained Andrew Stockett, a senior project manager. If crews kept working with gusts breaching 30 miles per hour, the siding the lifts were hoisting risked turning into sails, he said.
Proponents say the frontloaders and heavy haulers shaping the earth at the nuclear portion of the TerraPower facility outside of Kemmerer are cause for celebration.
“It’s really historic,” TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque told WyoFile over the phone. “Wyoming is really the center of this. It will have benefits for Wyoming: cheap electricity and jobs.”
Levesque’s appearance at a groundbreaking ceremony was another casualty of the wind. His plane couldn’t land in Salt Lake City because of it.
The 345-megawatt Natrium nuclear plant is expected to take 42 months to build, putting its expected completion date in 2031. If that timeline comes to fruition, the nuclear demonstration plant will be completed — from announcement to contributing electrons to the power grid — in almost exactly one decade.
Nearly five years ago, the Bill Gates-backed Bellevue, Washington company selected a site near the Naughton natural gas-fired power plant for its nuclear plant because of the availability of land, water for cooling and electrical transmission infrastructure. The project was billed as a way to address climate change while helping to meet the nation’s energy demands.
Permitting was a major hurdle. By early 2025, however, the Natrium plant received a Wyoming Industrial Siting Council permit. Then in March, the facility was awarded a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction permit.
A ton of work went into that, Levesque said.
“We had about 1,000 engineers working on the design for over three years,” he said. “That’s really what enabled us to get the approval from the federal regulators.”
The Natrium nuclear power plant is named after the Latin word for sodium, which is the cooling agent. That’s part of what makes it “next generation” technology — because the plant’s cooling doesn’t require water, which builds great pressure, it requires less steel and concrete to make it safe. In turn, Natrium will take much less labor and time to build to completion.
“We say it’s not your grandfather’s power plant,” Levesque said. “It’s a totally different design.”
The nuclear reactor is also being built underground. Those modifications differentiate the Natrium plant from the 94 existing nuclear reactors distributed at 54 power plants around the country.
It’s also supposed to be cheaper. Shortly after Kemmerer was picked to host the plant, it was billed as a $4 billion community-changing project that would generate about 1,300 construction jobs and another 250 long-term positions.
That price tag has risen. The expense of construction labor and steel has “changed a lot,” said Levesque, who declined to specify the new estimate. Regardless of the cost, the new technology is expected to compete economically, he said.
“The Natrium reactor will be competitive with combined-cycle natural gas plants,” Levesque said, “which are seen as the cheapest electricity out there.”
Bringing a new nuclear plant online is no small feat. Since the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor partial meltdown, the industry’s been lethargic, with more plants being decommissioned than built. Only three reactors have come online in the 21st century: In 2016, the Tennessee Valley Authority finished the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor and two reactors were added to Georgia’s massive Plant Vogtle in 2023 and 2024.
“It’s a big deal for the industry,” Levesque said. “This is America’s next commercial nuclear power station.”
TerraPower also has big plans. By the time the Natrium demonstration plant is supposed to be wrapped up in 2031, the plan is to have construction on multiple other reactors underway. Between two and eight of those could be providing power for Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
“We plan on being at 10 to 12 units delivered per year by the end of the 2030s,” Levesque said.
Construction of the very first is now underway in Wyoming.
