Kemmemer, Wyo., looks beyond its coal roots with a nuclear-power plant

“We’re going to dry up and blow away,” Thek recalled thinking at the time. “I had no idea how the heck I was going to save it.”

Three years later, he and many others in this deep-red corner of the nation’s top coal-producing state have pinned hopes on unlikely saviors: tech mogul Bill Gates and the Biden administration, co-funders of a $4 billion, first-of-its kind nuclear project expected to employ locals and position Kemmerer as a pioneer in a clean-energy movement powered by small reactors.

That is the idea, anyway. The projected start date has already been delayed two years to 2030 because the sole source of the special fuel needed is Russia, and required environmental reviews have pushed back groundbreaking to at least next spring. A similar federally backed project in Idaho folded this month amid spiraling costs. The setbacks have stirred doubts among industry analysts, as well as some Kemmerer residents who stop Thek at the town’s lone grocery to ask whether Gates and the feds can be trusted to deliver.

But in a community idling in the latter half of its latest boom-bust cycle, misgivings have taken a back seat to optimism — and a dawning acceptance that a region built on coal, oil and gas may have little choice but to embrace a new identity. Amid empty downtown storefronts, a chic mercantile is about to open and a new coffee shop churns out lattes. Worn bungalows are selling quickly. A housing development is in the works.

“If you talk to people here, the majority of them, about climate change, they’re going to flip you off,” Thek said. But, he added, “we’ve always been on the cusp of innovation when it comes to these industries. And here we are one more time, only now it’s nuclear.”

In this way, Kemmerer mirrors a broader energy transition underway in Wyoming. The state still produces 40 percent of the nation’s coal, but production has dropped by almost half over 15 years as renewables got cheaper and more customers demanded carbon-free energy. Pacificorp, the utility that owns Kemmerer’s plant and provides power in six states, is retiring all but two of its 11 Wyoming coal-burning units by 2030. That includes the Kemmerer facility’s three units, all of which will run on natural gas by 2026 and go dark by 2036.

The implications are immense: Half of Wyoming’s revenue comes from fossil fuels, and Gov. Mark Gordon (R) vows to keep extracting them. Yet he also considers climate change a problem worsened by carbon dioxide and touts an “all-of-the-above” strategy centered on carbon capture and sequestration, as well as wind and solar.

His position has drawn ire from the state GOP, which last year slammed what it called an “economic invasion” by Gates and other “subversive enemies of freedom” and this month passed a vote of no confidence in Gordon over his pledge to turn Wyoming “carbon negative.” The legislature, for its part, has passed laws penalizing power companies that seek to shutter plants.

Such protests are gradually giving way to pragmatism, however. “What Wyoming is trying to do is slow the transition as much as possible and in the medium term try to fill that in with opportunities that are available,” said Robert Godby, a University of Wyoming energy economist. Nuclear power is among those opportunities.

In remote Kemmerer, where top attractions are fossil quarries and the original J.C. Penney store, coal’s demise threatened to hit particularly hard. Most Wyoming coal comes from the vast Powder River Basin in the northeast, which is cheaper to mine and largely exported out of state. Most coal from the Kemmerer mine, in contrast, heads to the adjacent power plant. Losing the plant — and possibly the mine — would wipe out nearly 300 jobs, “devastating” a community with a stagnant population, Thek said.

The town already felt down on its luck. It has long surfed the vagaries of an energy economy, welcoming swells of crews that came to build another plant or drill for oil or gas, then left once the work was done. When Exxon constructed a large gas treatment plant in the 1980s, bars lined Triangle Park. There were two groceries,…