Kemmerer's locals, leaders eye transition to nuclear-power boom town
KEMMERER — A relic of 1950s-era motor lodges, the Antler Motel in the heart of Kemmerer rarely has to light its “no vacancy” sign, though customer traffic is steady during the summer tourist season and holidays, manager Rose Lain said.
One major boon for the Antler, and other hotels in town, are workers tapped for maintenance and occasional construction jobs related to the Naughton coal-fired power plant, the Kemmerer coal mine and a nearby natural gas processing plant. Those fossil-fuel facilities have driven the pulse of the local economy for decades, providing good-paying jobs for the rural shift-work town.
But in 2019 the power plant’s owner, PacifiCorp, switched one of the three coal-burning units to natural gas and scheduled all three units to be permanently closed by 2028. That threatened the livelihoods for some 126 workers at the power plant, another 300 workers at the Kemmerer mine that supplies the Naughton plant and signaled a major shift for the economic bedrock of Kemmerer itself. The news spelled a grim picture for Kemmerer’s future in an era when responses to human-caused climate change are driving utilities away from coal and toward cleaner sources of energy.
“Everyone’s been trying to sell their homes, and they still move away but their homes are sitting there vacant,” Lain said.
In November, however, Kemmerer’s prospects morphed overnight from ghost town to boom town when the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower announced it selected the southwest Wyoming town — and PacifiCorp’s Naughton plant — as the location for its proposed $4 billion Natrium nuclear power plant.
Read more: https://wyofile.com/kemmerers-locals-leaders-eye-transition-to-nuclear-power-boom-town/