(lively music) - With May comes the end of our current production season.

And we're taking a backward glance today to the places we've been and the people we've met.

From the groundbreaking at Wyoming's new generation nuclear power station, to the century old charcoal kilns that once powered an industry, to the giant monument to A. Blinken on Interstate 80, and a lifesaving hospital for magnificent birds of prey, we've covered a lot of ground.

Look back on the season's highlights.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(lively music) - [Narrator] Programming on Wyoming PBS is brought to you in part by Wyoming Humanities, enhancing the Wyoming narrative to engage communities with grants and programs across Wyoming for more than 50 years.

We proudly support Wyoming PBS.

- We began the season with a visit to camera where a new generation power plant is taking shape, not powered by coal nor natural gas, the wind or the sun, but by nuclear energy, it's called Natrium.

(lively music) (audience cheering and applauding) - Thanks so much for joining us all here today for the groundbreaking of America's Next Nuclear Power Station, Kemmerer Unit 1.

(audience cheering and applauding) - [Steve] Following introductory remarks came the ceremonial groundbreaking for what the new company, TerraPower Promises will be the first of numerous new generation nuclear power plants, built with three big advantages over the old ones.

Quicker and cheaper construction, more efficient operations, and providing both bountiful electricity and backup storage for the power grid.

The new plant is scheduled to go online in less than a decade.

Key to the TerraPower model called Natrium is a cooling core not of water, which must be kept in a high pressure containment vessel as it boils, but liquid sodium.

- Natrium is the name of our advanced reactor design.

We're building the first one here in Lincoln County, Wyoming.

Natrium also a word in many languages for sodium.

- My high school Latin kicked in.

- That's right.

That's right.

And on the periodic table, sodium is NA for natrium, which is Latin for sodium.

And we called it natrium because it's a new kind of reactor, it still takes advantage of fission.

We break uranium atoms in half, which give off heat, but instead of cooling it with water, we cool it with the liquid metal.

- Why is that better?

- It's better because sodium has a very high boiling temperature, around 900 degrees centigrade.

That lets us operate the reactor at a very low pressure.

We operate the reactor at 500 C so we're 400 degrees centigrade away from boiling.

And in contrast to today's reactors, which are water cooled, you know, we all know water boils at 212 Fahrenheit, 100 C. So it's not really an ideal coolant because you know, you have to worry about what happens if it vaporizes.

And there's been, you know, examples of that, for example, at Fukushima.

Our plant, because of that 400 degrees difference between operating plant and boiling temperature, has a huge margin for safety.

And it also gives you a situation where you need no operator action to keep the plant safe if you have some kind of natural event.

- When the original nuclear plants were designed, we didn't have the benefit of the advanced technology that we have today.

The difference really for us, we call it an advanced reactor, is that we're not using the water as the coolant and the plants are designed so that they're inherently safe.

Meaning that we're not building something where something could go wrong with the reactor and then building safety systems around those, you know, to mitigate the risk of that.

Instead, we're building, designing the reactor so that in the event that something is a bit off, like the power's a little higher than it should be, the temperature's a little higher than it should be, the reactor naturally, through basically natural forces, brings the temperatures and the reactivity back down.

So you don't need any operator to push a switch.

You don't need any external power.

Nobody has to open or close any valves.

- One of the richest men on Earth was there and he said America needs what's being built in camera.

- So this is a big step towards safe, abundant, zero carbon energy.

And you know, it's important for the future of this country that projects like this succeed.

And that's because we're not just gonna build one plant.

We're gonna build lots of these things.

We're gonna support electrification, we're gonna support keeping the world's best data centers here in the country.

And so we do need a lot more energy and you're the pioneers that are gonna make that happen.

- Ever heard of Piedmont, Wyoming?

Charcoal once thrived as an industry there and three giant 19th century stone kilns were that industry's centerpiece.

It must be what, 25 feet tall or more?

- 30 feet tall on these kilns to the point.

And yes, they are massive structures.

Again, they don't look near as impressive in photo or in film as they do when you actually come out here and just get a full scale of how big they are.

- And it's made of what?

- So made mostly out of limestone.

It's very likely they were pulling this limestone from the same formation and the same quarry that the buildings at Fort Bridger were pulled from - Josh, we're now inside this, the middle of the three kilns.

What sort of preservation work has has been done.

- So of course, this one's really fun to talk about 'cause this one is also really easy to see.

If you look at the walls of these kilns, you can still see the original char from when these kilns were used.

Now it's really easy to tell where we've done restoration work because you can see very clearly, the newer mortar.

Yeah, so anywhere you see that new mortar, and again, you can see especially the weather here in Wyoming, as we all know, gets pretty cold.

Snow gets pretty high and that really has a harder effect on the lower ends of these.

But you can also see as on this side how structurally these kilns, as time does all things is bringing it down.

And you can see our next restoration project will be making a repair on that point.

- So, you see a problem.

- This is something that we are continuously doing because again, everything needs maintenance and especially old stuff needs maintenance.

- So when the kiln was new, it looked more or less inside that it terms of the colors, at least the way it does outside.

- Absolutely.

- So the blackness we're seeing was from the charring.

And so there's mortar there, but it's just been been charred over.

Let me just say as well to the viewing audience.

It's not gonna get this chance to coming here and you can smell the charcoal prevalently still.

- Prevalently still.

- And I don't, the last time a loaded charcoal was made, but it's more than 100 years ago.

- Oh absolutely, over 100 years ago.

And again, you can still smell that- - You sure can.

- So prevalent here.

- What is charcoal?

It's not just a burn piece of wood, it's something far different from that.

- Yeah.

So charcoal of course is the process of taking something, a biological material, in this case, wood and trying to get everything but the carbon content out of it.

Really, if you can get that straight carbon content, your fire that you're burning with, it is gonna be a much higher temperature.

Of course, the Iron Age was started because of charcoal production.

It is impossible to work iron without at least charcoal.

- Because you need a lot of heat.

- Yes.

- And wood just wasn't gonna cut it.

- Yep.

Wood you can work, you know, little bits of iron, but if you really wanna work big pieces of iron, you have to have at least charcoal to get that kind of heat you needed.

- In many places throughout the centuries, people either didn't know about coal or they didn't have access to it.

So they made coal themselves essentially, didn't they?

What would happen industrially speaking, in this structure?

- So of course as you mentioned, this is at the point of industrial charcoal making and there was, you know, a smaller version of charcoal making.

But what's really impressive about this one is we know they were collecting timber as we that originally started as railroad ties.

They were then able to convert that use of that wood to char.

- [Steve] So it was forest, not far from here.

- Yup.

So they were harvesting those forests, cutting six to eight foot sections of logs.

They would haul them in of course through the door here as we got in.

And they would start stacking them.

And of course, as tightly as you can pack those logs would be as you wanted those.

And just to give you a good visual image, they weren't stacking them like this, they were putting them up.

So you'd have rounded logs sticking about eight foot tall up and you would stack that of course up against the back wall first so you don't paint yourself into a corner, building your way slowly across.

And as you got enough of that first level of logs, you could then, you know, climb up on with the next set of logs and stack those as high as you could.

'Cause again, the more wood you can get in here, the more charcoal you're gonna end up with.

And that means your production levels are gonna be higher.

So this thing would be just completely packed to the brim.

Once your wood is packed in your charcoal kiln, The idea is of course to make an almost fire.

As we kind of mentioned earlier, you need three things to make a fire.

You need a fuel source, a heat source, and oxygen to help burn that.

So for charcoal, we are actually going to take away one of those ingredients and fire.

We're gonna try and limit the oxygen to the point where it has just enough to smolder but not enough to actually catch flame.

If you've got flames, your charcoal is being ruined.

So you don't want that, you want it to smolder.

So of course, as we have this full of wood, we would then have a door that would go across this.

You close the door, seal off that doorway, again trying to limit any way for oxygen to get in.

Now as mentioned, you did need some amount of oxygen.

And if you observe, you can actually see a series of holes in the bottom of this kiln leading to the outside.

This allows you to get the oxygen into the very bottom part, which of course is the hottest part of that fire.

And where you need to make sure that oxygen is just enough to make it char but not enough to actually have it erupt in flames.

And you would actually have a series of workers who would work in shifts and this would had to be manned 24 hours.

And those guys would be watching the smoke content they'd be watching for any indication of flame leaking out of that window.

And they would actually be blocking and then unblocking these holes.

- So these were expert tradespeople.

- These guys knew what they were doing four to sometimes even up to eight days depending on different conditions and how well that went.

- So you come back in here, then pull the doorway, come back in, and the wood that had been piled to the very tip, if they could get it as close as they could, had been reduced by a factor of what, 75% sometimes.

You had this layer, this pile of a different thing.

- Yeah.

So of course what's happening on a chemical level at that point is all of the moisture, all of the different impurities that aren't carbon within that wood is being slowly charred away.

So when you end, you are gonna have something as 95 to 97% charcoal or just carbon content.

And that carbon is of course what we need to get that really hot burn.

- [Steve] And it's not ashes that you're seeing.

- No.

- Everything that you talked about being dissipated is through the smoke.

Am I right?

Is it a fair comparison, at least to the complete layman that I am to think about, you are sort of cooking it like you'd put it ingredients of a cake or something that we're liquid into an oven.

And what comes out is, and you don't set fire to it, you heat it and what comes out is something different and you have this new substance.

- And that is actually a really, really good comparison to that.

Again, the whole idea of a kiln, whether it's a charcoal kiln, a lime kiln, or even a kiln for pottery is not necessarily to burn stuff or light stuff on fire.

It is to cook it.

- Injured eagles hawks and owls have a friend, a lot of them actually at the Teton Raptor Center near Wilson.

Dozens of birds of prey are rescued, nursed to health, and rehabilitated there.

And there's crucial raptor research being carried out as well.

Because Wyoming is one of the best places on earth to do it.

- Pava is a Swainson's hawk.

She's around three years old.

She came to us after being hit by a car.

Car collisions is the number one reason we get birds in our rehab besides window collisions.

And so she came in with torticollis, her head was twisted and stuck to the side.

She was partially temporarily paralyzed on the side of her body.

And with every single raptor that comes into our care, our goal is to get them back into the wild where they're meant to be.

Now our rehab team is phenomenal.

They were able to get her to what's called cosmetically perfect, meaning physically you cannot tell there's anything wrong with her.

But unfortunately, Pava was left blind in one eye.

And that is a very common injury that could potentially qualify for education.

So every bird that comes into education, we have to determine that they are pain-free and as stress-free as possible.

Just because they come into education does not mean that they're no longer wild animals.

And so when they're working with us in education, we are working every single day to ensure that they have the highest welfare possible.

What you saw in this moment was Chino is actually putting on Pava's gear.

This gear is for safety purposes, Pava's defense and her weapons are her feet.

And so to allow Sheena to touch around her feet to put this gear on and takes an incredible amount of trust.

And so Sheena has worked with Pava for thousands of hours to develop this relationship.

- [Steve] Like the other captive raptors in the education program, Pava's injuries weren't severe enough to kill her.

Thanks in large part to the care she received at the Raptor Center.

But they were severe enough to erode her chances of long-term survival in the wild.

- Her chances in the wild would be severely impacted and that is why she did not return into the wild.

Forward-facing eyes allow us to experience depth perception to tell how far something is from us.

Swainston's hawks actually migrate down to Argentina in the fall and winter.

And so that means that they're undertaking upwards of a 6,000 mile journey.

And in this process their diet switches totally over to grasshoppers in Argentina.

And so if you're a few inches off when you're hunting a grasshopper, it's not gonna wait for you.

- [Steve] The longest tenured resident of the dorm is Gus, a 19-year-old golden eagle who has lived virtually his entire life at TRC.

Unable to fly because of a wing injury, Gus hops around the hallway energetically, always interested in checking out who's there and what's going on.

- Though he can't fly, he makes a great educational ambassador 'cause he also runs around this hallway space.

He'll run back and forth, up and down the hallway, exploring and doing things that a natural bird would do.

So this is kind of his hallway exploration time.

- Interstate 80 stretches nearly 3,000 miles across the US but the highest point is in Wyoming.

For more than 50 years, a giant bronze monument to Abraham Lincoln has adorned the summit to commemorate the route of the grand old Lincoln Highway.

On the coldest day of our Wyoming Chronicle year, we went to the mountaintop on Lincoln's birthday to learn more about the statue.

and the man who made it.

It was created by a person who was not a Wyoming native, but became extremely well-known in the world of art in a way that I doubt could happen again today.

Robert Russin was the sculptor and there was a period of time when he was well-known in Wyoming as being a sculptor.

He did other things beside this.

But this is, wouldn't you say his great Wyoming masterpiece for sure?

- It is.

And actually, people know about the Lincoln Bust, the monument, the Lincoln head here all over the world.

It's a testament to his skill as a sculptor in bronze and he also did stone sculptures as well.

- What's this monument made of?

- So this is bronze.

It was cast in 30 separate pieces and he had to do it in a stable environment and so he had to do it in Mexico.

- Well think of, yeah, if you have to do a project, an art project that's gonna take months and months to do, it's two degrees here on top of the mountain today in February on Lincoln's birthday.

- Yeah.

- And six months from now, it might be 80 degrees here and it's not conducive to working in materials that you sculpted with.

So he went to Mexico because- - He did.

- Stable climate there.

- He put a mold together, you have to do the mold first out of clay.

And it was so heavy that it broke apart.

So they had to do it twice, yeah.

- And then it got here with great difficulty and then had to be bolted into place.

- Right.

- And then it had, of course- - In the winter.

So they did the installation in the winter and they built the base of it.

They quarried the granite, they assembled the base when they bolted it together.

- [Steve] To coincide with Lincoln's 150th birthday.

- [Anne] Yes.

- [Steve] That's the significance of 1959.

- [Steve] Yes.

- [Steve] But adding to the colorful history of the thing, it wasn't where it is now then.

- No, but it was right up the hill.

So actually right on that ascend, that's the Lincoln Highway and it was right there.

So when you're standing 'cause it's still level.

So when you're standing there, you can look down on this, - You can.

- It runs parallel.

So it's very cool.

- Yeah, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, that was the occasion of placing it there.

But not long after that, the Lincoln Highway ceased to be because the interstate highway system.

- Right.

- Came to be.

And so 10 years later, it was moved here.

So adding to the history of the difficulty of getting the thing made was they had to pick up and move it again.

Was that a difficult thing to do?

- Of course, but it's a testament to how they realized how important it was.

How many people started to notice it.

It's a beacon.

Especially when you're dealing with a snowstorm.

But on a nice day, it's a beacon.

But you know, I very often drive from Cheyenne to Laramie and in that fog, in that night mist when I wonder if I'm gonna make it Laramie.

- [Steve] And you look and see 'cause it's lit at night.

- Yes, you are right there.

And so you can see it so far off in the distance glowing.

- When we think of state parks and historic sites in Wyoming, mountains, lakes, trails on canyons come to mind along with old forts or train stations.

But in the prairies, near Chugwater, there's a very different kind of state parks installation.

The Quebec One Nuclear Missile Control Station, a Cold War mainstay that's now a fascinating historic site for tourism.

There never was an actual missile here.

But this controlled missiles, in case the unthinkable were to happen, they would be controlled for firing and launching from an installation like this or this very one?

- That is probably one of the common questions we get folks come out to us and they say, "Well where's the missile?

Can I go see it?"

It is not here.

So Quebec One, as we've kind of alluded to, is a control center.

So these missiles would have been housed in unmanned silos ranging from five to 15 miles away from this centralized location.

- This side has been decommissioned.

It operated three different missile systems during its time.

What were those?

- [Alexis] So we started as a minute man one site, moved to the minute man three system in the '70s, and then in 1986 we became a peacekeeper site.

- In the world of nuclear weaponry and deterrence.

- Yes.

- It was an awesome system, wasn't it?

- It was.

It was very big.

It was very powerful.

Very, very impressive.

- [Steve] But now doesn't really exist anymore, correct?

- [Alexis] It does not.

- All right, 50 feet underground now.

- 50 feet.

- It's much cooler down here.

- Yes it is.

- All right, let's go.

- Stays about 55 degrees year round.

So very nice place to be in the middle of a Wyoming summertime.

- All right, let's go see the capsule.

- Sounds good.

So the room we're in now is what we call the LCC or the launch control center.

So this is where you would have found your two missiles serving their 24-hour shifts, handling various issues that come through and then possibly launching one of these missiles if they were given the order to do so.

- So they'd come in here, they'd show up from F.E.

Warren Air Force Base- - Correct.

- In Cheyenne.

And they would stay here you say, for 24 hours.

- Yes.

- They would stay in this room that whole time?

- They would.

They would stay in this room for 24 hours.

They could not leave as there always had to be at least, or there always had to be two people down here in the capsule at all times.

- Yeah, and one reason I think, and this is can be kind of uncomfortable things to think about or talk about.

So if the unthinkable order came, you'd have some verification.

- You would.

- One person couldn't just say, "Well I heard him say this" or, "I got this command."

- Yeah.

- The other would have to concur and that was part of what was going on.

- That was part of it.

- About the most serious business that there's ever been.

And that's what they were prepared, trained to do if it came to that.

- [Alexis] It was.

- [Steve] This is a combination of really, really elaborate sophisticated technical equipment.

But it's also very old now.

- [Alexis] It is, it is.

- [Steve] So it's metal and it's rivets and it's screws and it's toggle switches and there's a rotary telephone dial and older style keyboards.

But this was the absolute state of the art and it stayed that way the entire time.

So this has a great 1962 look.

- [Alexis] Yeah.

- [Steve] But up into the 21st century, this was still the look, this is still what they were using.

- [Alexis] It was.

They honestly haven't changed much of the technology.

Even if you were to go down into a modern still in use LCC, some of this would look pretty much exactly the same.

- [Steve] Yeah.

There is a little rest area here.

There's a bed if someone needed to catch a few winks.

There's a restroom facility there, which is far from luxurious, but again would accommodate.

Then I'm assuming they'd have to bring some food down here as well.

- Yeah, they could either bring their meals, we do have a fridge and a microwave here.

Or they could call up to the chef that was on site and the chef could bring them down food as well.

- And one of the most popular interview guests of the season was an octogenarian bird watcher from Riverton.

Bob Hargis has seen and documented more than 6,000 different bird species and he's become a global ambassador of birding in the process.

Even in the midst of a sit down television interview, birder Bob had to point out a distinctive bird to the host and camera crew.

- Oh, look at the sharp, excuse me.

We gotta stop.

There's a sharp shin hawk on the deck landed just behind you, Steve.

You wanna take, I'm sorry.

Should we shut it off?

- Can we see him?

- We see it.

It's right there, yeah.

- One of my favorites.

- Yeah, there he is.

And he's probably trying to, "Oh, it's a nice male.

So nice."

- So you can tell the difference between the coopers and the sharp shin?

- Well that one was good because his head was like this.

It's kinda, they got no neck.

- [Staff] Down.

- He went down.

He's checking a drink.

Anyway.

I'm sorry.

Keeping eye contact with a bird watcher you noticed is quite difficult, Steve.

- Do you have a favorite bird ID that you've ever made that you think, "Boy, this was something I've always wanted and I got it."

- Sri Lanka in 19, knowing that there was a bird called a Serendib scops owl.

A villager had found it and told me where it was and he didn't speak much Eng, but it was on a muddy cliff and I was pretty, I'm an old guy.

When I crawled up that cliff and the mud and fell down but photographed it - [Steve] There it was.

- That was exciting.

- Worth it to you?

- Oh, well, I was sweating bullets.

But yeah, it was definitely worth it.

- This is our 23rd Wyoming Chronicle show of the season and the videographer, the man behind the camera for every one of them has been Matt Wright.

We've had additional videography support this season from Steven McKnight, Murray Ritland, and even a bit from yours truly.

Remember, all our Wyoming Chronicle shows can be viewed anytime online, both at wyomingpbs.org and our Wyoming Chronicle channel on YouTube.

We already have a couple of new shows recorded for the new season and we're hitting the road right away to create even more.

Our production manager is Mr. Kyle Nickoloff and our general manager and CEO of Wyoming PBS is Joanna Kail.

That's a wrap for now.

As for the new season, we'll see you in September.

You're watching Wyoming PBS.

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