Nuclear technology companies interested in doing business in Gillette, mayor says

GILLETTE — Nuclear energy may soon have a home alongside oil and coal in the energy capital of the nation.

Gillette Mayor Shay Lundvall said Wednesday that multiple nuclear technology companies have expressed interest in establishing themselves in Gillette — but no permanent decisions have been made.

“I am aware that there are some potential companies looking into Gillette, but nothing has been solidified,” Lundvall said.

Wednesday, employees of manufacturing company BWXT told a legislative committee they were interested in several Wyoming companies as partners in nuclear research and manufacturing — including L&H Industrial, a major energy technology manufacturer based in Gillette. BWXT representatives told the committee the company is developing plans for its own advanced nuclear reactor in the state.

Lundvall said that as he’d signed non-disclosure agreements associated with companies scoping out the city, he wasn’t able to share their names, but did say that the specialties of the companies interested range throughout the spectrum of the nuclear technology supply chain.

“There’s uranium companies all the way up to production companies and manufacturers, so it’s exciting times,” Lundvall said.

At this point, Lundvall said it’ll be up to the companies themselves whether or not they establish themselves in Gillette. He wasn’t able to confirm a timeline for when those companies would make a public proposition — but if it was on his timeline, they'd be here already, he said.

As far as plans for temporary storage of any nuclear waste associated with Gillette operations, Lundvall said those plans have yet to be nailed down in specific, at least in part.

“Parts of (a short-term storage plan) have, and parts of it haven’t,” Lundvall said. “Is there something that we can craft in such a way that makes sense that there’s a temporary storage until that (long-term) repository is completed? … So there’s a win here, and there’s a solution here, I truly think that.”

While the Wyoming Legislature passed a law in 2022 under House Bill 131 that allows nuclear power plants operating in the state to temporarily store their own nuclear waste, the question of where to permanently store nuclear waste will require the government to develop a long-term repository.

Last week, Lundvall, along with Campbell County Commissioner Jim Ford, met with members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., in response to what Ford called a “call from the White House to our City Hall.”

A Trump administration executive order released in May this year mandated the development of a national policy to manage spent nuclear fuel, among other nuclear technology-related goals, within 240 days. 

Right now, the DOE is designing an interim storage facility to consolidate the more than 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in the country currently stored at more than 70 nuclear power plant sites in America, but there are no long-term facility plans currently being funded.

One long-term repository site, or deep geological repository, in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was under development for decades, beginning in the 1980s, before the project’s funding ceased in 2010. The Trump administration has so far declined to pick up the Yucca Mountain project.

Council member Heidi Gross confirmed there are nuclear technology companies interested in making a home in Gillette, but she declined to share details.

“I think we’ll have to wait and see if (these companies) decide to relocate in this area … we’ll go through the steps at that time,” she said. “It’s a business decision on their part.”

If the interested companies were to make a home in Gillette, Lundvall said they’d be bringing in “a lot of jobs,” in construction, security, and from local contractors — and that such a move would “raise all ships.”

“We’re on the front lines of this, and I want Gillette to be prosperous 50 years from now, next year,” Lundvall said. "We have an ecosystem that supports each other just like the oil rigs have done, just like the coal has done.”

This story was published on July 31, 2025.