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Feb 15, 2026
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Inside TerraPower’s World-First Nuclear Project Being Built Just Outside Kemmerer
Work is progressing fast just outside Kemmerer at TerraPower’s first-of-its-kind nuclear power project. Cowboy State Daily went on a tour to get an inside look at the 167-foot-tall facility that will stress-test massive Natrium reactor components.
February 15, 202610 min read
KEMMERER — The first thing a visitor to TerraPower’s site in Wyoming will notice is just how tiny the company’s rapidly rising Test and Fill Facility is rising up against the surrounding snow-dusted hillsides.
From a distance, the steel beams look terribly tiny, like breakable matchsticks that a strong Wyoming wind could come along and blow away.
But fragile looks are deceiving, and that becomes clear the closer one gets to the Test and Fill Facility (TFF), which will test, process and deliver liquid sodium to cool the nearby first-of-its-kind Natrium nuclear reactor.
The beams being used to build the unique structure are massive. The sizes vary, but they are 6 feet thick and up to 100 feet long, weighing as much as 90,000 pounds for each beam.
And the idea behind the Test and Fill Facility is also just as massive. It’s the start of an advanced reactor that radically rethinks nuclear power.
Not Water
The plant TerraPower plans won’t use water at all to cool the reactor. It will use molten sodium instead, a commercial first for America, if realized.
TerraPower’s nuclear plant will be the first of many, the company has said. But the TFF?
That one is a one and only.
“This is actually unique to this deployment,” TerraPower’s Senior Vice President and Project Director for Natrium Pat Young told Cowboy State Daily on a behind-the-scenes look at the facility.
“Because it’s a facility where we’re going to test a lot of our major components before we actually put them into the main reactor facility, we won’t have to build another of these facilities,” he said. “It’s particular to this site.”
Steel for the facility’s interior erection crane was installed inside the TFF in 2025, a huge milestone for the project with the U.S. Department of Energy, which is cost-sharing up to $2 billion for the overall $4 billion project.
Electricians were working on a conductor rail to provide power to an interior crane the day Cowboy State Daily visited the site.
A 200-foot crane towered over the scene where the TFF’s 167-foot steel girder frame cut the sky into discrete panes of stained-glass blue.
“In 2026, one of our milestones is to get the outside sheathing on so it’ll start to look like a building,” Young said. “It will look quite a bit different from the road as you drive by then.”
There Has To Be A Better Way
Backed by billionaire Bill Gates, the novel 345-megawatt nuclear power plant being built near Kemmerer will be much smaller and much cheaper than the hulking reactors of old.
The last two reactors built in America were the massive Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, which required 23,000 tons of structural steel to build — enough to make 25,000 medium-sized cars — and enough concrete to build a 3,375-mile sidewalk from Miami to Seattle.
The cost to build Vogtle Units 3 and 4 was $35 billion.
TerraPower officials told Cowboy State Daily they did not have any figures on how much concrete and steel it will take to build the TerraPower nuclear plant.
Gates has told outlets like the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that he hired an engineering team of hundreds to reimagine safer, less-expensive nuclear power back in the early 2000s.
“My nuclear journey started several years earlier when I first read a scientific paper for a new type of nuclear power plant,” Gates wrote in his blog at gatesnotes.com. “The design was far safer than any existing plant, with the temperatures held under control by the laws of physics instead of human operators who can make mistakes.”
The paper outlined a shorter construction timeline, as well as cheaper operating costs.
“And it would be reliable, providing dependable power throughout the day and night,” Gates said. “As I looked at the plans for this new reactor, I saw how rethinking nuclear power could overcome the barriers that had hindered it — and revolutionize how we generate power in the U.S. and around the world.”
Gates started TerraPower in 2008 to turn the concepts he’d been exploring with nuclear scientists into reality, and he selected Kemmerer as the first site of many planned plants, not just in America, but around the world.
Getting Rid Of All That Pressure
It’s not just size that will be different when it comes to TerraPower’s nuclear plant. It’s also going to use a completely different design.
The traditional approach to nuclear power has been to pump water into a reactor core heated by atomic fission, then use the steam to create electricity.
Systems that use water are also highly pressurized, which requires heavy piping and thick containment, adding to the high cost of these facilities.
The high pressure also presents legitimate safety concerns, which have held nuclear power plants back, bringing to mind the meltdown problems presented by Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island.
TerraPower gets away from high pressure systems by using molten sodium instead of water as a coolant, decreasing the need for all that thick shielding.
Liquid sodium can also absorb a lot more heat than water without reaching dangerous temperatures. That widens the safety margin.
Air vents, rather than water pumps, will cool the facility in an emergency instead of water. This approach won’t require emergency electricity or pumps to work.
TerraPower has estimated its system will produce electricity at half the cost of a traditional nuclear plant, all while boosting safety, in a system that’s designed to easily adjust power output so that it can mesh with fluctuating power sources like wind and solar.
Moving Fast
TerraPower’s Test and Fill Facility is set to be finished by 2027.
“What we’re doing now is what we would call pre-nuclear work,” Young said. “We’re going to likely receive our nuclear construction permit in the spring, and then we’ll start doing what we call ‘nuclear work,’ which means that it’s regulated work where this is more commercial work.”
The company has three questions left to answer ahead of consideration of its construction permit, Young added.
“I don’t remember what the questions are, but our licensing department has basically said they’re not anything untenable,” he said. “It’s just protocol. But we’re very, very favorable on getting our license to construct.”
President Donald Trump has signed numerous executive orders to speed America’s development of nuclear power, deeming it important to national security. That’s had some people questioning the safety of the plant.
Young acknowledged that permitting has been moving “lightning” fast, but added that it’s a “testament to what we call our safety case,” which he believes to be “rock solid.”
A Mechanic Shop, But For Nuclear Plants
The Test and Fill Facility is part of that safety case.
The tallest building on the site in Kemmerer, it’s more or less a mechanic’s shop for nuclear power plants.
“So, the bridge crane will be for bringing in some rather large equipment to be tested,” TerraPower Director of Construction Andy Chrusciel told Cowboy State Daily. “On the north side of the building, you’ll have a flatbed truck, let’s say, bringing in a big pump.
“It’ll back into the building. Then the bridge crane will pick up the pump and bring it over to the test stand.”
After that, the pump will get put through its paces — full-scale testing to ensure everything works as planned.
One wall of the TFF is now being kept open to accommodate installation of large pieces of equipment. That will get closed off once all the truly large things are in place.
The facility is also located within proximity of a railroad where a rail spur could one day be built, if desired. But right now, the stuff TerraPower is bringing is too large to travel that way, Young said.
“Not so much weight, but just physical size,” he said.
The TFF won’t just be for the nuclear plant at Kemmerer.
“If we have upgrades or different configurations on our fleet product, we’ll bring them here to test,” Chrusciel said. “Plus, there’s been interest from other companies using this as a test facility.”
The building has been designed with versatility in mind, Young added.
“I think it will be used in the future,” he said. “It’s quite a versatile building for what we need throughout the deployments we have. There’s nothing like this in the world. It’s world-class.”
Definitely Scalable
TerraPower has 110 workers on the Kemmerer site now, Young said.
They’re working on not just the Test and Fill Facility, but also the training and welcome center, which will sit at the very front entrance of its 60-acre site directly across from the Naughton Power Plant, which is in the process of converting its coal-fired turbines to all gas-fired.
The 110 TerraPower workers are just the tip of the spear for what’s coming to Kemmerer soon.
The company has estimated it will bring 1,600 construction workers during peak construction of the Natrium nuclear plant, which is set to span a five-year period.
After construction, the plant will support an estimated 250 people, including plant security.
That might be a low-ball estimate, however. Kemmerer Mayor Robert Bowen told Cowboy State Daily there has been “some talk” of a No. 2 unit, in which case employment numbers would grow.
“It’s definitely scalable,” Bowen said. “It can be added to easily.”
Around The World, But Kemmerer First
TerraPower officials have not said whether the Kemmerer plant will grow, but they have said it’s just the first of many that the company plans to build around the world.
As such, they see Kemmerer as something of a “mother ship.” That has a little synergy with the city’s “mother store” — the nation’s first-ever JCPenney store.
TerraPower has signed a development agreement with Meta for up to eight more reactors, which could mean a nuclear plant could be located in Cheyenne.
Young said the development agreement is stronger than a memorandum of understanding, but not yet a contract to build.
“This is where we’re basically doing all the work to understand, for Meta and others, what it would look like in detail to deploy this technology for them,” he said. “In our case, they approached us and said, ‘Help us understand how to use your technology.’
“So, it’s very favorable.”
The company has also signed other agreements and memorandums, which suggest plants are in the works for places like Kansas, Oklahoma, and Utah in the United States, and it’s thrown its hat into the ring with countries like the United Kingdom as well.
At the Kemmerer site, orange pylons already mark the spot where the nuclear plant is going. These are actually wells to monitor groundwater, which was a requirement of the plant’s permitting.
“These are about 250 feet, just to see how the underground water system is over time,” Chrusciel said. “It’s just to make sure there are no underground anomalies, hydrodynamic anomalies, that we need to be aware of. But this is one of the most perfect building sites I’ve seen.”
Where many building sites require a lot of rock blasting, Chrusciel said this one isn’t going to require much of that at all.
The project is exciting, not just for Wyoming, but America, Young said.
“It’s not often that nuclear reactors are built in the United States,” he said, looking out over the white, snow-dotted area with orange pylons. “The last construction permits that were issued for commercial reactors were about 2013 for the plants in Georgia and South Carolina. This reactor technology for what they call Gen 4 technology is a generation shift in safety relative to reactor technology.
“So, it’s a monumental thing,” he continued. “Not only for the state, but the country.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
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Renée Jean
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LLAW’s Thoughts, Concerns, and Fears about Today’s Nuclear World and Beyond . . .
This project — one of a kind — using something called molten sodium instead of water as a coolant, which is and will be its claim to fame, which is also its “better or for worse”. Terra Power will live or die with its “dry” cooling system, and if successful, Gate’s and Company intends to build likenesses around the globe.
My personal hope is that the project will fail because it would no doubt generate more “just as dangerous” in many ways, including terrorism and other illicit forms of both governmental and corporate opportunities for dark nuclear power if we continue to build the concept of “dry-cooling” nuclear fuel followed by similar power plants, which, to me at least remain as dangerous to human life as ever, because the refined fuel does not come from the yellow cake (U308) that eventually becomes U235, U238, up or down, and so on — and presently we have the most dange4rous utility waste product on Earth — which has never been cleaned up == along with all of its waste products including plutonium, cesium, and strontium — such a plant would also lead to a popular misconception of the general safety of nuclear power generation itself . . . or, in other words, add to the creation of even more nuclear power plants on a global basis. And today’s so-called “Gen4” reactors are not the answer regardless of the industry’s claims because they are electronic safety devices that are based on computerized detection and dangerous isotopes, However, if we remain alive long enough, we mays be truly blessed with “new generation” reactors that operate in much the same way as the U308 mining product that are, in reality, safe, but at what cost and how many generations success will it take us? Believe me, it is not worth waiting for (you can listen to the optimistic science of uranium fuel and it’s long-term safety claims in the short video below:
On a personal level, I began my “nuclear” career at one of the first nuclear mining/milling operations — not too far from Kemmerer — near Riverton, Wyoming, in central Wyoming, even before nuclear fuel was even allowed to sell nuclear power to commercial power company’s beyond the government sponsored Tennessee Valley Authority, and spend parts of three decades believing it was the best producct sine “sliced bread” until the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident and attempted cover-ups . . . and switched my allegiance to General Electric’s Tungsten operations in Nevada, so I do know something about the nature of the nuclear energy business including the basics. ~llaw
LLAW’s Nuclear World News Today . . .
About Today’s Nuclear News, Files, Categories, and How it Works . . .
There are 7 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcano and caldera activity around the world that also play an important role in the survival of human and other life.
The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). If there was no news from a Category today, the Category will not appear. The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
- All Things Nuclear
- Nuclear Power
- Nuclear Power Emergencies
- Nuclear War Threats
- Nuclear War
- Yellowstone Caldera
- IAEA News (Friday’s only)
A Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
LLAW’s Nuclear World News, Sunday, 02/15/2026
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Are we entering a new nuclear arms race? – WWNO
WWNO
KELLY: What about the Europeans? Since we’re standing here in Munich in Germany, the buzz in Europe is all about figuring out how to navigate a world …
Inside TerraPower’s World-First Nuclear Project Being Built Just Outside Kemmerer
Cowboy State Daily
That will get closed off once all the truly large things are in place. The facility is also located within proximity of a railroad where a rail …
AI Job Displacement: Myths, Truths, and What’s Next | Financial Sense
Financial Sense
… nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything they can get their hands on. … So everything about how you live, the things you use, your healthcare …
Nuclear Power
NEWS
Pentagon Deploys Next-Gen Nuclear Reactor To Military Base In Historic Energy Initiative
Dallas Express
Pentagon and DOE launch a historic initiative for next-gen nuclear reactors at military bases, enhancing energy independence and security.
What a Speech Reveals About Trump’s Plans for Nuclear Weapons – The New York Times
NYTimes.com
The nuclear power source of this Russian weapon can in theory keep the cruise missile airborne far longer than other nuclear-armed missiles. 12.
Pentagon to transport and test next-generation mobile nuclear reactor – Washington Times
Washington Times
The Pentagon on Sunday will transport and ultimately test a next-generation mobile nuclear reactor at a facility in Utah, officials said, …
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
Governor declares state of emergency as energy costs soar: ‘We must provide short-term …
Yahoo
It includes building new power sources generated from in-state solar, battery storage, and nuclear energy. “We must provide short-term relief and …
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
Strategists War-Game Preemptive Strike On Russia’s Nuclear-Armed ASAT – Forbes
Forbes
“Any credible threat posed by Russia or any other country to deploy a nuclear weapon in orbit,” Klein warns, “should be negated or neutralized before …
U.S., Iran to hold new round of nuclear talks in Geneva this week, Swiss government says
Spectrum News
However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear … Senate rejects Trump’s military threats against Venezuela with war powers vote.
Once the Americans Warned of the Russian Threat. Now, It’s the Europeans’ Turn.
The New York Times
… War or the era that followed, nuclear experts say. But the slow … Putin is conducting an active shadow war in NATO territory, a threat that Mr.
Nuclear War
NEWS
Iran ready to discuss compromises to reach nuclear deal, minister tells BBC in Tehran
BBC
… nuclear weapon, something it has always denied. … Takht-Ravanchi also questioned the US military build-up in the region, warning another war would be …
US and Iran to hold more nuclear talks as Trump sends world’s largest aircraft carrier to Mideast
Fortune
Before the June war, Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels. Iranian President …
Iran and U.S. to hold nuclear talks in Geneva, Swiss minister says | PBS News
PBS
Similar talks last year broke down in June as Israel launched what became a 12-day war on Iran that included the U.S. bombing Iranian nuclear sites.t
Yellowstone Caldera
NEWS
Yellowstone is hiding more than 80,000 earthquakes below its surface – MSN
MSN
“Now, we have a far more robust catalogue of seismic activity under the Yellowstone caldera.”
Mag. 4.2 earthquake – South Pacific Ocean, 57 km south of Huacho, Lima region, Peru, on …
Volcano Discovery
Caldera. (pop: 537). II: Very weak. Huaura, Lima region · Peru. 72 km (45 … Latest earthquakes under Yellowstone volcano. List and interactive map …
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