Ask most folks what built the Powder River Basin, and they'll tell you it was hard work and good coal.
Both are true, but the trigger was federal policy. When President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 and created the EPA, the new sulfur limits sent power companies hunting for low-sulfur coal —Northeastern Wyoming was sitting on Great Plains of it.
The 1990 amendments tightened the screws further. The Powder River Basin went from producing 4.6 million tons of coal with 448 workers in 1969 to 184 million tons and more than 4,600 workers by 1990, according to the Wyoming Mining Association.
In 1984 we passed West Virginia to become the number one coal state in the nation.
Sit with that for a second: coal didn't boom despite Washington. It boomed because of Washington. A rule written to clean the nation's air happened to require exactly what Wyoming had in the ground.
Now look at nuclear, which is the same story told backwards. For half a century, federal regulation didn't lift the nuclear industry — it smothered it.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission built a culture so risk-averse that it effectively stopped licensing new reactors altogether, holding the industry to radiation standards stricter than the natural background you're sitting in right now.
In the half-century since the NRC's creation in 1974, it has licensed two reactors from start to finish — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and that pair took fourteen years and ballooned from a $14 billion budget to over $30 billion.
Not due to safety hazards, but due to regulation and oversight from the federal government; something Wyoming coal is no stranger to.
Then the door opened. In 2024, Congress passed the bipartisan ADVANCE Act to speed reactor licensing.
In May 2025, four executive orders by the Trump administration ordered the NRC reorganized around a new mandate — to enable nuclear, not just police it — complete with fixed 18-month licensing deadlines and a national goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050.
The same machinery that once made coal king is being retooled to build more reactors. The only question is whether Wyoming walks through this door the way our grandparents walked through the last one.
What Washington gives, Washington can take. The regulatory state that built our coal boom later turned on it-- a federal land plan would end all new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin by 2041.
Wyoming is now tangled in more than fifty lawsuits defending its fossil fuels and has stood up a dedicated "Coal Litigation Fund" to pay for the fight. Nuclear isn't a betrayal of that history. It's the hedge and the next hand.
One county sits at the heart of both energy revolutions.
More than 97% of Wyoming's coal comes from eleven mines in Campbell County, home to eight of the eleven largest coal operations in America. And now BWX Technologies wants to build a $500 million TRISO nuclear fuel fabrication plant east of Gillette, the first such facility built in the United States in decades. The State has already committed $100 million toward it.
In Kemmerer, TerraPower broke ground this spring on its Natrium reactor — the first commercial advanced reactor the NRC ever permitted.
And the uranium that feeds all of it sits in our soil. The same county that powered the last century is positioned to power the next one.
Before anyone's imagination runs to mushroom clouds, understand what this plant is.
It takes enriched uranium delivered by truck and fabricates it into TRISO fuel — uranium kernels the size of a poppyseed, each sealed in carbon and ceramic that the Department of Energy calls one of the toughest fuels on earth.
For the fear that still lingers: the coal we've lived beside for generations is itself mildly radioactive. An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study found a coal plant releases roughly 100 times more radiation into its surroundings than a nuclear plant producing the same power. We have handled energy responsibly, at scale, for a half century. This is more of the same.
Now picture the other path. Two years ago, a company called Radiant wanted to build its advanced reactors near Casper — then packed up and took its jobs to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, amid regulatory uncertainty and a cold local welcome.
Tennessee had a nuclear fund ready and caught exactly what we dropped. Meanwhile our anchor industry keeps shrinking: Wyoming coal production has fallen by roughly half since its 2008 peak, 2024 was the worst year on record since the coal boom in the 1970s and forecasters expect output to keep sliding.
Chase off the successor industry too, and Gillette is left with a contracting mine economy, a hollowing tax base in a state with no income tax, and a generation of young people who leave because the future moved somewhere else. That isn't caution. That's surrender in an installment plan.
Wyoming holds the nation's largest known uranium reserves; we already pull the raw material out of our own ground. The prize now is to own the entire chain, cradle to grave and back to cradle.
The industry has three great unsolved problems: America can't enrich enough fuel domestically to feed its own reactors, it has nowhere permanent to put spent fuel, and it doesn't reprocess the fuel it could reuse.
Those aren't reasons to run — they're the most valuable unclaimed ground in American energy. The country aims to quadruple its nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050; private investment in advanced nuclear has jumped more than thirteenfold since 2023, part of a digital-infrastructure-and-power buildout Goldman Sachs pegs near $5 trillion.
Imagine Wyoming as the state that enriches the fuel, fabricates it, and solves storage and reprocessing on its own terms — not the place the waste gets dumped on, but the place that master’s the cycle and gets paid for it outright, with no royalty owed to anyone.
It would take hard conversations and changes to our laws. We are the right people for it: a state that knows hard energy work, owns the resource, and has never once been shy about a fight.
That fight is the whole point. Wyoming has sued the federal government more than fifty times and bankrolled a Coal Litigation Fund to defend an industry that is, by every honest measure, declining. Imagine pointing that same muscle forward — not to slow the inevitable, but to pave the way for an industry that can bolster the economic base brought in by coal. We fought like hell to keep what we had. We ought to fight twice as hard for what we could become.
Wanting the industry isn't the same as being ready for it. Roughly 80% of the jobs at the BWXT plant will be operator roles, and the people who pour its foundation and weld its steel are tradesmen, not PhDs.
The smartest investment Wyoming can make right now is in the welders, pipefitters, electricians, concrete crews and technicians who will build and run this thing.
The state has already shown it knows how — putting nearly $2 million into Western Wyoming Community College to launch a nuclear science associate's degree. We should do the same right here, at Gillette College.
The University of Wyoming doesn't offer a full nuclear engineering degree. It rolled out nuclear certificates in 2025, but a certificate you bolt onto another major is not a degree, and the worst outcome is for this industry to fire up here and then import all its talent from somewhere else. Build the degrees and fill it with Wyoming kids.
To be a regressionist now is a sure-fire way to let people who don't have your best interests at heart make your decisions for you. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and if we don't force our seat at the table, we don’t eat.
Out-of-state interests will gladly make those decisions for us. Look at who's already walking out the door: more than 60% of people born in Wyoming leave before they turn 30 — the highest rate of any state in the nation, according to U.S. Census data — and roughly two-thirds of University of Wyoming graduates pull up stakes after they finish their degrees, carrying the Wyoming values this state raised and educated off to Denver, Fort Collins, Salt Lake and Dallas.
The young people filling in behind them are increasingly newcomers from out of state, who arrive with their own ideas about what this place ought to become. A state that exports its children and imports its decision-makers will always negotiate from weakness; that weakness only hardens as our talent and our money drain away.
Show up to the meetings, and back the initiatives that put our young people on a path into building a future for Wyoming. Every dollar we invest in our students today is a down payment on a generation that can stay. Build the degree. Invest in these kids now, and we don't just win a plant. We give Wyoming children a reason to raise their families in Wyoming.
Thomas Lubnau III was born in Gillette. Graduated from West Point in 2022 with a BS in Nuclear Engineering, currently serving as an infantry officer at Fort Drum, NY.
