Dear editor:
A recent article in Cowboy State Daily titled “Inside TerraPower’s World-First Nuclear Project Being Built Just Outside Kemmerer” describes technology that will soon make wind energy generation, and possibly solar energy generation, obsolete.
Why should counties in Wyoming issue 30- to 40-year permits for industrial wind facilities that take huge amounts of land to generate intermittent, unreliable electrical power carried on transmission facilities that are currently at capacity, when the new generating capabilities described in the article provide safe, modular, reliable power that can be sited on small footprints at or very near user facilities, and avoid the transmission bottleneck?
Molten salt atomic reactors are not new; they simply have been rediscovered.
Terrestrial Energy, a US/Canadian company and competitor to TerraPower, has for more than a decade been in the process of licensing and commercializing its brand of Integrated Modular Salt Reactors (IMSR).
The company already has two operating pilot plants in Canada and one licensed for construction in the United States. See: https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/
These electrical generating facilities, when combined with safe battery energy storage systems, keep the generation of electricity local to the application loads, and they present extremely smaller footprints than what is being proposed by companies like NextEra, EnGen, Repsol, and other Independent Power Producers (IPPs) for Wyoming.
It is time for people in Wyoming to become more informed about the current developments in the energy sector that the IPPs and their proponents do not want them to consider.
Let us not be saddled with obsolete wind energy technology for the next 30 to 40 years.
Dr. A. Keith Miller, Chugwater
