EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
Why Kemmerer, Wyoming Matters: Part 3
By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper
Energy production has always been the life blood of Kemmerer, Wyoming. The town was named after Pennsylvania coal magnate Mahlon Kemmerer, and for most of the town’ s existence, coal mining was the economic fuel that powered the community. Coal from the Kemmerer Coal Company mines fueled Union Pacific and Oregon Short Line trains as they made their way through the vast expanses of Southwestern Wyoming.
One of the darkest moments in Kemmerer’ s history occurred on August 14, 1923, when an explosion in one of its mines killed nearly 100 coal miners, sending shockwaves through the small western outpost. Coal production continued unabated for decades as the energy demands of a growing nation increased dramatically, and Wyoming eventually became the number one coal producer in the United States.
However, climate change concerns slowly began to erode coal’ s popularity, along with all other fossil fuels, because carbon emissions from burning these fuels were found to be a major contributing factor to climate change. Some climate activists argue that we must realize net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 or face apocalyptic consequences. 1 This almost impossible goal can only be accomplished with the severe curtailment of all fossil fuels, sounding the death knell for the coal industry.
This was a double blow to the citizens of Kemmerer whose two major employers include one of the deepest open-pit coal mines in the United States and the coalfired Naughton power plant, which has been in operation since 1963. Kemmerer faced a bleak economic future, but hopes of a turnaround came from an unlikely source: nuclear power.
The nuclear power industry in the United States and Europe has seen little growth for decades. Meltdowns at Three Mile Island( 1979), Chernobyl( 1986) and Fukushima( 2011) galvanized resistance to nuclear power expansion and reinforced
“ I was to see a grandeur which no words can describe in the Wyoming plains reaching away at sunset to meet the sky. I was to breathe the indescribably stimulating fragrance of sagebrush after an early morning shower. I was to learn that there is no picture to compare with the everchanging beauty painted by the rays of the descending sun aslant a timbered mountain side, shading from somber green to purple, and when the sun has gone down to deep black. I was to learn that there is almost human courage, hope, determination and tragedy in the clump of quaking aspens daring to live at the crest of a high hill, bent and twisted and gnarled by the pounding of a west wind that is never still. I was to learn that the rugged men who tend cattle and sheep on Wyoming’ s hills and plains, till its fields, build their homes along its streams and in its mountain valleys far from the highways and Pullman car windows, dig coal from its depths, drill oil wells a mile deep, and provide food and fuel for hundreds of thousands, do all this because they had the courage to brave hardships and the vision to see the rewards that courage and industry bring out here in this last frontier of America.
But it would take a long time.”
the fears of many that nuclear power was too dangerous and must be curtailed. These fears stymied the economic development of nuclear power. Moreover, movies such as The China Syndrome( 1979) reinforced fears by implying that capitalist greed and shoddy construction methods would lead to numerous catastrophic nuclear meltdowns if the industry was allowed to continue.
Nuclear historian James Mahaffey has labeled the early Cold War as the“ Age of Wild Experimentation.” This age pitted the United States against the Soviet Union in a competition to see which nation could set off the largest nuclear explosion. The scores of explosions terrified the world. In the United States, schoolchildren were taught that“ duck and cover” was the best defense against a possible nuclear attack.
In late 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower addressed the United Nations in what became known as the“ Atoms for Peace” speech. Eisenhower, having no desire
— Robert Rose, Kemmerer resident( 1914 – 1923)
to continue the arms race with the Soviet Union, urged the world to focus instead on the peaceful uses of nuclear power, especially its ability to supply an abundant source of energy. He offered to share the secret of nuclear technology with the rest of the world in an effort to move from the destructiveness of nuclear power to peaceful lifesaving and sustaining purposes. Nuclear power chronicler Marco Visscher contends that,“ While the atomic bomb was developed to win World War II, the nuclear plant was used to win the Cold War.”
The first nuclear power plant in the United States went online in 1958. 2 With it came the promise of an almost limitless low-cost source of energy. 3 Unfortunately, the fears begat by nuclear power’ s initial violent wartime use, the possibility that weapons grade materials could be produced at nuclear power plants and the overwrought worries that nuclear plant meltdowns posed an unacceptable threat generated a powerful protest movement
www. MoAF. org | Spring 2025 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 11