Russian reverberations

KEMMERER, WYOMING, a small, soon-to-be-former coal-mining and power plant town in the southwest corner of the state, is a long way from Ukraine and the Russian invasion of the former Soviet republic. But Kemmerer’s future is inextricably entwined with what happens in Ukraine — and with how the Biden administration responds to it.

That’s because Bill Gates-backed TerraPower hopes to construct its first advanced nuclear reactor in Kemmerer. The new reactor will run on only one type of fuel: high-assay, low-enriched uranium — HALEU — which has higher levels of uranium-235 than conventional reactor fuel. Russian company Tenex, a division of state-owned Rosatom, is currently the world’s primary commercial-scale producer of the fuel. The U.S. Department of Energy hopes to ramp up uranium enrichment capacity to produce it domestically,