Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Dustin Bleizeffer):
October 8, 2024
With a handful of dissenting votes, a legislative panel has advanced a draft measure that proponents say merely provides the opportunity to discuss changing Wyoming statutes to enable temporary storage of high-level radioactive fuel waste from nuclear power plants.
The Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee on Tuesday voted in favor of the draft bill Used nuclear fuel storage-amendments, which means the committee will sponsor the measure when the full Legislature convenes in January.
Committee Co-chairman Rep. Donald Burkhart Jr. (R-Rawlins), a longtime proponent of bringing nuclear fuel waste into the state, first rolled out the potential for new legislation regarding the matter in July, but neither he nor the committee shared a draft of the proposed legislation until weeks before the October meeting. The bill draft would amend past legislation mostly to align existing state statute with updated language regarding commercial nuclear waste storage with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy, Burkhart said.
“This is not a discussion of why or why not to have this,” Burkhart said at the onset of the discussion, adding that the committee took up the issue at the request of the Legislature’s Regulatory Reduction Task Force. “This is simply to amend the current statute.”
Burkhart was clear in July when he notified his fellow committee members of the pending proposal in draft form — which he shared with them, but not with the public — that nuclear storage held financial promise. The outlook for Wyoming’s fossil fuel-dependent budget is trending downward, and the state could reap more than $4 billion a year from nuclear waste storage, “just to let us keep it here in Wyoming,” he said then.
Also in July, Burkhart said he’d recently visited with a private landowner in Fremont County who, as in the past, is interested in selling land for such a storage facility. The land purchase would cost an estimated $2 million, Burkhart had said, and it would cost about $400 million to build the facility. “None of which would come from the state,” he said. “It would all come from private enterprise.”