{"id":22634,"date":"2025-07-23T17:20:05","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T23:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=22634"},"modified":"2025-07-23T17:20:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T23:20:05","slug":"a-nuclear-shift-at-lava-ridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/23\/a-nuclear-shift-at-lava-ridge\/","title":{"rendered":"A nuclear shift at Lava Ridge?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Proposal For Idaho\u2019s First Nuclear Plant Takes Shape<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

BY Mark Dee<\/em><\/p>\n

In a shift that mirrors federal priorities, a nuclear power plant may find a home in southern Idaho at a site slated for a wind farm as recently as last year.
\nSawtooth Energy and Development is eyeing 320 acres of public land in northwest Jerome County for a nuclear facility. The site sits on the corner of the roughly 100,000 acres previously slated to house the 241-windmill Lava Ridge Wind Project proposed by Magic Valley Energy. While the Bureau of Land Management greenlit a version of the wind project in December, President Donald Trump froze development via executive order on the first day of office.
\nNow, Sawtooth Energy is working towards developing Trump\u2019s preferred power source\u2014nuclear\u2014on a portion of the same land. Spurred by financial incentives and buoyed by deregulation around commercial nuclear reactors, the Pocatello-based firm expects to submit a preliminary plan to the BLM as soon as next month, according to Project Manager Dan Adamson.
\n\u201cNine out of ten things have fallen towards nuclear,\u201d Adamson said. \u201cThey\u2019ve made doing a draft environmental impact statement ten times easier. They have put more grant money to work, and interest deductions, and federal tax credits. The whole attitude of the president towards nuclear kind of says it all.\u201d
\nIf approved, the plant would be the first commercial nuclear facility in Idaho, and one of the first in the nation to use small modular reactors, a nascent technology that can be built in factories and assembled on site, cutting construction costs and saving time. Sawtooth Energy\u2019s preliminary plan is to buy six of them, which Adamson expects to produce enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. While substantial, that\u2019s less power than would have come out of Magic Valley\u2019s wind proposal, even after the BLM cut the proposal in half in the face of public opposition.
\nAdamson says that nuclear has two advantages over wind. First, the plant\u2019s footprint\u201440 developed acres within a 320-acre safety buffer\u2014is considerably smaller than the roughly 104,000 acres set aside for the Lava Ridge plan, which would have disturbed nearly 5,000 acres for windmills. Second, the reactors can run 90% of the time, whereas windmills can only generate power when windspeeds are right.
\nThere are downsides, too. Chief among them: Small modular reactors simply don\u2019t exist in the U.S, and are likely years away from domestic use. Two plants use versions of these systems worldwide, one in Russia and another in China, according to industry outlets. In America, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently approved the design of Sawtooth Energy\u2019s preferred model, but the vendor, NuScale, still targets 2030 for deployment, according to reporting from Reuters.
\nThen, there\u2019s the fuel. While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a courier service for delivering radioactive materials, there\u2019s no permanent national repository for spent fuel; that means spent nuclear rods live in vaults onsite at all plants nationwide, Adamson said. Sawtooth Energy\u2019s plan would be built to federal safety specs, Adamson said, with capacity for about 20 years of nuclear material. Idaho Power, which has a plan to transition to entirely \u201cclean\u201d energy by 2045, considers nuclear energy clean because it doesn\u2019t emit any carbon dioxide, according to spokesman Sven Berg, but \u201csome experts do not consider it renewable or green due to other considerations\u201d like spent fuel disposal.
\nBerg said that Idaho Power hasn\u2019t analyzed Sawtooth\u2019s proposal, though ultimately the plant\u2019s power would most likely run through the company\u2019s infrastructure. The appeal of the site is its proximity to the Midpoint Substation, a key distribution site, which Idaho Power co-owns with PacifiCorp, an Oregon-based utility.
\n\u201cIt is one of the most important electrical hubs in the Mountain West,\u201d Berg said. \u201cEnergy generated all over the western U.S. goes through it to utilities and customers all over the West.\u201d
\nAdamson called it \u201cone of the largest substations in the world.\u201d
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not just a teeny thing,\u201d he said.
\nSawtooth Energy\u2019s chosen site is 2.75 miles from the transmission hub, which significantly cuts costs, Adamson said.
\n\u201cWe\u2019ll put in 10 towers instead of several hundred towers if we were going to a further substation,\u201d he said.
\nFrom there, the power will be brokered to buyers throughout the west via a process called \u201cwheeling,\u201d with Idaho Power taking a fee as it sends the electricity through its transmission infrastructure.
\n\u201cBroadly speaking, Idaho Power supports nuclear and small modular reactors for electric generation when it is affordable for our customers, and when we have a clear notion of how long a small modular reactor for electric generation will take to develop for commercial purposes,\u201d Berg said in a statement. \u201cIdaho Power receives many requests from third-party developers seeking to develop generation projects and connect them to the electric grid. These developers can work through the federally mandated interconnection process to connect their projects to Idaho Power\u2019s or other utilities\u2019 electric grids.\u201d
\nThe Idaho Conservation League is also \u201cpaying close attention\u201d to Sawtooth\u2019s proposal, according to a statement form ICL Executive Director Justin Hayes:
\n\u201cWe\u2019re open to exploring all technologies that can help Idaho reduce emissions, strengthen grid reliability, and provide affordable electricity. Nuclear energy\u2014particularly SMRs\u2014could play a role. But before moving forward, we must ask the right questions.\u201d
\nThose concerns include safety, reliability and cost\u2014but also concerns about the technology\u2019s readiness and whether Sawtooth Energy, which was incorporated early this year and has no prior projects on its resume, can deliver.
\n\u201cAs with any major infrastructure proposal, it\u2019s fair to ask whether the developer has the experience, resources, and partnerships to bring a project like this to life,\u201d Hayes said. \u201cBefore the public invests significant time, it\u2019s important to know who\u2019s behind the proposal and whether they can follow through. After all, Idahoans will be the ones living with the results\u2014good or bad\u2014for decades to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Proposal For Idaho\u2019s First Nuclear Plant Takes Shape BY Mark Dee In a shift that mirrors federal priorities, a nuclear power plant may find a home in southern Idaho at a site slated for a wind farm as recently as last year. Sawtooth Energy and Development is eyeing 320 acres of public land in northwest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":479,"featured_media":22635,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,83,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment-2","8":"category-idaho","9":"category-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/479"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22636,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22634\/revisions\/22636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}