Outside a small coal town in southwest Wyoming, a multibillion-dollar effort to build the first in a new generation of American nuclear power plants is underway.
Workers began construction on Tuesday on a novel type of nuclear reactor meant to be smaller and cheaper than the hulking reactors of old and designed to produce electricity without the carbon dioxide that is rapidly heating the planet.
The reactor being built by TerraPower, a start-up, won’t be finished until 2030 at the earliest and faces daunting obstacles. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn’t yet approved the design, and the company will have to overcome the inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear projects before.
What TerraPower does have, however, is an influential and deep-pocketed founder. Bill Gates, currently ranked as the seventh-richest person in the world, has poured more than $1 billion of his fortune into TerraPower, an amount that he expects to increase.
“If you care about climate, there are many, many locations around the world where nuclear has got to work,” Mr. Gates said during an interview near the project site on Monday. “I’m not involved in TerraPower to make more money. I’m involved in TerraPower because we need to build a lot of these reactors.”
Mr. Gates, the former head of Microsoft, said he believed the best way to solve climate change was through innovations that make clean energy competitive with fossil fuels, a philosophy he described in his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”
Nationwide, nuclear power is seeing a resurgence of interest, with several start-ups jockeying to build a wave of smaller reactors and the Biden administration offering hefty tax credits for new plants.
Hopes for TerraPower’s project are especially high among the 3,000 residents in the nearby Wyoming towns of Kemmerer and Diamondville. For decades, the local economy has depended on a coal-fired power plant and an adjacent mine. But that plant is scheduled to close by 2036 as the nation shifts away from burning coal.
A new reactor, and the jobs that come with it, could offer a lifeline.
“When the talk a few years ago was that we were losing the coal mine and the power plant, this wasn’t a happy community,” said Mary Crosby, a Kemmerer resident and the county grant writer. The reactor, she said, “gives us a chance.”
At a recent conference in New York, David Crane, the Energy Department under secretary for infrastructure, said that two years ago he “didn’t really see” a case for next-generation reactors. But as demand for electricity surges because of new data centers, factories and electric vehicles, Mr. Crane said he had become “very bullish” on nuclear to provide carbon-free power around the clock without needing much land.
The challenge was building the plants, Mr. Crane said. “Nothing we’re trying to do is easy.”
A new type of reactor
Mr. Gates became interested in nuclear power in the early 2000s after scientists persuaded him of the need for vast amounts of emissions-free electricity to fight global warming. He was skeptical that wind and solar power, which don’t run at all hours, would be enough.
“Wind and solar are absolutely fantastic, and we have to build them as fast as we can, but the idea that we don’t need anything beyond that is very unlikely,” Mr. Gates said. How, he asked, would Chicago heat homes during long winter stretches with little wind or sun?
One problem with nuclear power, though, is that it has become prohibitively expensive. Traditional reactors are huge, complex, strictly regulated projects that are difficult to build and finance. The only two American reactors built in the last 30 years, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, cost $35 billion, more than double initial estimates, and arrived seven years behind schedule.
Mr. Gates is betting that radically different technology will help. With TerraPower, he funded a team of hundreds of engineers to redesign a nuclear plant from scratch.
Today, every American nuclear plant uses light-water reactors, in which water is pumped into a reactor core and heated by atomic fission, producing steam to create electricity. Because the water is highly pressurized, these plants need heavy piping and thick containment shields to protect against accidents.
TerraPower’s reactor, by contrast, uses liquid sodium instead of water, allowing it to operate at lower pressures. In theory, that reduces the need for thick shielding. In an emergency, the plant can be cooled with air vents rather than complicated pump systems. The reactor is just 345 megawatts, one-third the size of Vogtle’s reactors, making for a smaller investment.
Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s chief executive, said its reactors should ultimately…
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