This is an interesting story.
I'm glad this isn't going forward. It shouldn't, because of where it's located.
But because of where its located is where it drew attention.
In Natrona County, over the past year, residents have risen up in opposition to this gravel mine, a proposed solar farm in the western end of the county, and a proposed nuclear generator manufacturing facility north of Casper. In Gillette there's some sort of controversy going on over some sort of nuclear facility. And there's a big debate on a wind farm in Laramie County.
It's hard to know what to make of all of this.
What is clear is that local politicians respond to the controversies. I'm sure if you asked any one of the Natrona County Commissioners if they supported energy, they would say yes. And they'd all say they support mining. But when the votes come, they're voting like they're members of Greenpeace.
And one local legislature says that his nickname is now "No nuke" for his opposition to the nuclear generator facility.
Nuclear energy is the safest and most efficient form of power generation we have, and until the mysteries of fission are unlocked, if ever, it'll continue to be. In a rational world we'd have a five year plan to replace every coal burning plant in the country with nuclear power.
Indeed, going one step further, we'd mandate the retirement of petroleum fueled everything in that time frame, or perhaps ten years.
The reason we don't is because, for the most part, even though we're the smartest animal on the planet, we're not anywhere near as smart as we like to think we are. If we were, we'd make decisions based on logic. Most people don't. Most people make decisions based on emotion.
It's easy to understand why a person would emotionally resent a gravel pit in their backyard, more or less, or solar panels taking up acres of land. The same with windmills. Nuclear? Well, the opposition to nuclear is due to our having used the bomb to murder thousands of Japanese civilians. It's stuck with us and we fear it, as that was our first use of it. People will tell you they are worried about contamination and the like. Bah. It's Hiroshima and Nagasaki they're worried about, even though that can't happen.
I'm old enough to remember when we had open pit uranium mining in Wyoming. In the early 1980s I knew a few guys who worked out at the Shirley Basin mine site, including one who lived in the little, now abandoned, town of Shirley Basin. I also knew some who lived and worked in Jeffrey City, where they worked in uranium mines. When they closed down, the state was distraught.
Now it seems nobody remembers that, and the thought of anything nuclear drives people into fits of despair.
I think a lot of it is fear of change.
That in fact explains a lot about populism And it explains why the current heavily right wing populist in Natrona County are adamantly against something that the populists in Washington D.C. reading Uglier Home and Paved Garden are for.
Change, we're told, is inevitable. If it is, it's because we will it so, much of it through our absolute laziness. We want our lives to be easier and more convenient just for us, but at the same time we want things to stay the way they are.
Which for a person like me, whose an introverted, introspective, agrarian, is particularly amusing in some ways.
I really hate change, myself, and I also want things to be the way they were. But not five or ten years ago, like so many of the people who protest on these matters. Indeed, many are quite new imports.
Victor Colorado, 1900. One of these houses was my great grandparents'.
I'd like them to be like they were in 1879 when my family first arrived in this region. . . or even earlier if possible. I'd settle for 1963, when I personally arrived.
I won't get those wishes.
I will note, however, a nuclear powered America might look more like American in 1879 than the one of 2025 does. As I look out at all the protests I'm struck by how many people in Wyoming are absolutely wedded to the oil and gas industry. It wasn't always so.
Back in the 1960s (I have a long memory) a lot of locals remained pretty skeptical about the oil and gas industry, in part because the state had recently been shafted for its reliance upon petroleum. People loved it again in the 1970s but when that boom collapsed people swore to never be reliant upon it again.
We apparently got over that.
Now we fear what we know to be true. Petroleum and coal won't last forever. The dirty little secret of the petroleum industry in Wyoming anymore is that drilling is really for gas far more than petroleum oil. Petroleum is on the way out, like it or not, and the United States is an expensive oil and gas province to drill in. Absent actually prohibiting its import, which I wouldn't put past Donald Trump, Saudi petroleum will always be cheaper. For that matter, Russian petroleum will always be as well and thinking you can really prohibit India China from importing it is absolute folly. Coal, which we've dealt with extensively, in a slow but accelerating death spiral.
The sort of imaginary world so many in MAGA wish to return to. Big powerful cars, driven by guys of course, but at the same time don't want to return to, as living without as much as these people did, compared to us, would be uncomfortable.
Donald Trump may say "drill baby drill", and put thousands of acres up for coal leasing, but Trump in many ways is the last dying gasp of of the 1950s.
And the 50s of our imaginations never existed. But we fear that it didn't, as we fear the thought that our oil stained hands will reach the point where we'll have to grab a bar of Lava soap and scrub it off, forever. The jobs will go away.
Funny thing is, from time to time, there's been serious proposals to put in something related to local agriculture, which was here in the beginning of our statehood, and still is. Wyoming hadn't really supported a big ag project since the 1930s, and indeed local municipalities oppose things related to agriculture. It's short sighted.
But then, perhaps I'm romantic about for various reasons that recent migrants to the state don't share.
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