Bechtel Walks Away From TerraPower’s Natrium Reactor in Wyoming

Bechtel is stepping down as lead contractor on TerraPower’s Natrium demonstration reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, after the two companies failed to agree on terms for the project’s next construction phase. Bechtel notified Virginia officials this month, under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, that it will eliminate roughly 200 positions at its nuclear engineering headquarters in Reston, Virginia, starting in November. TerraPower, the reactor developer founded and chaired by Bill Gates, says the plant remains on schedule despite the split.

Why the two companies parted ways

According to the WARN filing and subsequent reporting, Bechtel and TerraPower could not reach agreement on the commercial terms needed to move the Natrium project into its next phase of construction. Bechtel has been the lead engineering, procurement and construction contractor on the plant since TerraPower selected it for the role; the two firms are now separating rather than resolving the dispute on the existing contract. Bechtel has said it will remain involved only long enough to finish the sodium test and fill facility already under construction at the site and to support an orderly handover, while TerraPower prepares to rebid the main EPC contract to a new builder.

What the Natrium plant is meant to do

Natrium is a sodium-cooled fast reactor design paired with a molten-salt energy storage system, intended to generate 345 megawatts of baseload electricity that can ramp up to 500 megawatts for several hours to meet peak demand — a feature aimed at reactors that need to complement, rather than compete with, wind and solar output on the grid. The Kemmerer plant is TerraPower’s first commercial-scale demonstration of the technology, sited next to a retiring coal plant so it can reuse existing transmission and some of the workforce. The project carries an estimated cost of about $4 billion, roughly half of it backed by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.

TerraPower says the 2031 target still holds

Despite losing its lead contractor mid-project, TerraPower maintains that Kemmerer Unit 1 is still on track for construction completion in 2030 and commercial operation in 2031. The company has already been building early, non-nuclear portions of the site — including the sodium test facility Bechtel will finish — under a separate construction permit while it awaits full licensing from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the reactor itself. Replacing a lead EPC contractor mid-build is unusual for a first-of-a-kind reactor and adds schedule risk, but it does not by itself invalidate the current timeline; the practical test will be how quickly TerraPower can rebid and onboard a new contractor without losing the specialized nuclear-construction staff Bechtel is now laying off.

Sources: WyoFile, “Lead contractor pulls out of Gates’ Natrium nuclear power plant project in Wyoming,” Sept. 23, 2026 — WARN filing details, job cuts and company statements; Construction Dive, “Bechtel splits with Bill Gates-backed nuclear project, files layoff notice,” Sept. 2026 — contract dispute and EPC rebid plans; Power Engineering / power-eng.com, “Bechtel-TerraPower’s Natrium EPC contract” — project cost and DOE funding figures; NucNet, “TerraPower and Bechtel Part Ways on Natrium-1 Nuclear Project in Wyoming.”

Related coverage: Turkey and US Agree to Study Nine Small Modular and Next-Gen Reactor Designs | Samsung C&T to Invest Up to $100M in Kairos Power’s Hermes 2 Nuclear Plant | Italy’s Senate Approves Return to Nuclear Power After 39-Year Ban

Illustrative image. Photo: IAEA Imagebank, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — source