To say that Kemmerer, Wyoming is a community built on coal is an understatement.

Not only has the city — population just over 2,400 — been a coal mining hub since 1897, but it’s actually named after the man who founded the area’s first mines.

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But America’s energy needs are changing, and Kemmerer is ground zero as the site of the first nuclear power plant built by TerraPower, a nuclear design and technology company founded in 2008 by billionaire Bill Gates.

“It will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world, and it will be much safer and produce far less waste than conventional reactors,” Gates wrote of the plant — known as Natrium — in 2023. He added that nuclear power is needed to meet growing energy demand while reducing carbon emissions.

The town is covering half the cost of the $4 billion plant, which TerraPower touts as “the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States,” capable of powering up to 400,000 homes while using liquid sodium instead of water to cool reactors and absorb heat.

Opponents, though, disagree with that assessment, and some members of the community aren’t so sure how they feel about a nuclear reactor next door either. As resident Janet Lively, who works in a Kemmerer coffee shop, told USA Today, “I would say our community is split.”

From coal country to nuclear boomtown

Brian Muir, Kemmerer’s City Administrator, told Moneywise that while the city “still desires to be known as a coal-mining community” with an active coal plant, the timing of the nuclear plant’s arrival “is fortuitous” due to the conversions of other local coal plants to gas.

Muir expects “a dramatic economic impact during the building of the plant,” with up to 300 workers arriving this year and 1,600 “at peak construction.”

The plant is slated for completion by 2030 and, Muir claimed, will provide 250 full-time jobs.

“There will also be a multiplier effect of jobs and businesses that support the construction workforce and new residents, and we are pursuing creating more nuclear-related jobs and industry in Kemmerer,” Muir added. “We are glad that we can have yet another type of multigenerational workforce to keep our community thriving and prosperous.”