CHEYENNE — Gov. Mark Gordon did not mince words when calling out “Club No” and Freedom Caucus legislators in comments made Friday morning.

Gordon spoke with TRN Media’s Al Harris Friday morning in an interview focused on the recent announcement that Radiant Nuclear would abandon plans to build a facility in Wyoming and instead focus on a similar project in Tennessee. 

“We ended up not doing what Wyoming has done so well, which is when we find a problem, we sit down, we solve it,” Gordon said. “In this case, we had a bunch of folks from the group I call ‘Club No,’ which is ‘we don’t want to do anything, anywhere, anytime.”

Gordon said the situation is really sad in that the Club No group happily threw the Radiant Nuclear proposal to Tennessee. Gordon blamed misinformation from Freedom Caucus-aligned legislators that he claimed don’t want to see anything else in the state. 

“I think they’ve got some false ideas,” Gordon said.

Gordon described Club No as a group who falsely propose new technology will harm old, existing technology, citing the Freedom Caucus members as members of that club. Gordon said that viewpoint is false because the state has seen the lives of coal-fired power plants extended and cites discussion to bring the Naughton plant in Kemmerer back online. 

Radiant cited regulatory uncertainty, but Gordon said the fear that Wyoming would become a national dumping ground for nuclear waste was never on the horizon for the state. He did say there are rules in place to ensure that wouldn’t have happened while the state worked on additional regulations to ensure better monitored storage. Gordon said the state has made it clear it doesn’t want to receive nuclear waste from the rest of the nation, but said the case with Radiant was the company would build small reactors that would be used for smaller-scale uses like rural villages. 

Smaller nuclear reactors have also been proposed for use in Wyoming’s trona operations, with Tata Chemicals announcing last year that it would look at installing up to eight microreactors to power its operations. Tata’s plan would see it purchase and install the reactors sometime during the early 2030s.

Gordon said the nation needs to figure out how to store spent nuclear fuels, citing that several solutions have been proposed, but said the state has primacy on its environmental laws, sage grouse regulations and industrial development.

“We fought hard to make sure we can bring industry here, not by being bureaucratic and trying to throw things in the way of industrial development, but by bringing common-sense solutions that protect the environment we love … at the same time making sure that we have those jobs,” Gordon said.

Gordon said the nation has an increasing demand for electricity following decades of flat demand. That increased demand comes off the back of development in both artificial intelligence technology and the need for more datacenters. A datacenter that has recently started construction in Cheyenne intends to use a closed-loop water cooling system for its hardware, but Gordon said it will use as much electricity as the entire city of Cheyenne.

Gordon said the Club No group is synonymous with what the leaders of the Freedom Caucus are telling voters, which he views limits local control and favors centralized decision-making based in Cheyenne. 

“That Club No crowd, they’re the ones that are about ‘Let’s cut everything on the local level so local governments don’t have control, let’s make sure only the legislature can make choices about where you shop, what you shop for, how you buy your electricity, what you can do with your property;’ these are all part of that Club No crowd that really oppose what Wyoming was built on,” Gordon said.