IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — Nuclear energy is “coming back in style,” Gov. Spencer Cox jokingly said in his opening remarks at the Western Governor’s Association conference Monday.
He was striking an analogy related to his fashion sense.
A few days ago, after Cox returned home “from a very, very long day,” he put on something comfortable: his shorts of at least 20 years, he said. “It’s something my wife wishes I wouldn’t wear,” the governor added.
When a friend arrived to their residence unexpectedly, she asked him to change. Only Cox said he didn’t feel like doing so and instead opted to apologize to the guest. The friend told him not to worry. “He’s like, ‘That’s coming back in style,’” Cox said.
The Idaho National Laboratory “is a bit like that,” he said. This lab continued testing and developing nuclear energy even after conservationists turned their backs on it, he said.
“Now the rest of the country and the rest of the world are realizing that they made a huge mistake,” Cox added. “They need to go put those shorts back on.”
In June, the Western Governors Association united behind Cox, the current chair of the association, for his “Energy Superabundance” campaign.
The two-day conference this week in Idaho is one of four in a series of planned events to be held around the West in support of the campaign. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is expected to host the next one. At the end of the year, WGA will compile a report that will guide the organization’s policy on nuclear energy.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little, who spoke before Utah’s governor, praised Cox for the “well-timed” initiative. Little signed an executive order to create an advanced nuclear task force.
“Energy demand is expected to increase by an unprecedented 30% in the near future. We cannot do that with our legacy energy,” he said. The rise of artificial intelligence and data centers as well as the shift toward electric vehicles is driving this spike.
“We are going to have to have scalable, safe nuclear energy.”
Recent groundbreakings for nuclear projects in Idaho and Utah
As part of the campaign, the Western governors will look at energy production, transmission, and storage.
“The country is looking to the West right now for energy superabundance,” Cox said. “We cannot move at the speed of government.”
Leaders in the Mountain West are welcoming this change. Earlier in the day, Cox and Little attended a groundbreaking ceremony for nuclear power startup Oklo.
They were joined by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, Idaho Sens. Mike Crapo and James Risch, Rep. Mike Simpson, and other state officials.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman serves as the chairman of Oklo’s board.
“We once forgot how to build in this country — but that is changing," Cox said in a social media post. “Idaho and Utah are proving that we can lead again with safe, reliable nuclear energy.”
Valar Atomics, which hopes to use nuclear technology to create other products like hydrogen and synthetic fuels, started construction on a nuclear test reactor at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Orangeville last week. This was in partnership with Utah and the Department of Energy.
Before Spencer Cox gave his opening remarks on the progress on his energy campaign as a part of the Western Governor’s Association, he touched on the tragedy Utah is navigating, following the death of Charlie Kirk.
“It’s been a rough weekend in my state,” said Gov. Spencer Cox. “Rough two weeks.”
“We’re kind of running on fumes at this point,” the Utah governor said.
He thanked the audience of more than 50 people — mostly made up of advocates, experts and lobbyists in the energy space — for giving him a “semblance of (normalcy).”
John Wagner, the director of INL, said in his three decades as a nuclear engineer, he observed quite a few “false ... nuclear renaissances.”
The federal government seriously pursued these ideas around 2010, mostly because of utility growth, Wagner noted. But the momentum quickly fizzled out.
So much is different now. He pointed out that energy demands are expected to grow exponentially before noting the Cox administration’s Operation Gigawatt, which hopes to “double the power in Utah by 2035 and triple it by 2050.”
The INL director said he observes “massive growth” in energy demand in all parts of the country but particularly in the West.
“Now we have utilities restarting reactors that were shut down and intended to be decommissioned,” Wagner said. Michigan’s Palisades Power Plant will reopen this year, he added. It closed in 2022 for a few reasons, including high costs associated with running the reactor and replacing its aging equipment.
If this project, led by Holtec International, a utility company, is successful, this power plant will be the first in the U.S. to reopen after closing, thanks to federal and state funding.
Microsoft struck a deal last year to help reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, in collaboration with Constellation Energy, which dubs itself as the country’s “largest producer of reliable, clean, carbon-free energy.” Three Mile Island, a power plant in Pennsylvania, experienced an accident in 1979. No one died but there were radiation concerns after the accident.
Utah, Idaho and Wyoming “are really leading the West in terms of their policy direction and leadership” but because these states don’t have nuclear power plants, it “presents a challenge, or perhaps we look at it as an opportunity, to do some necessary proactive engagement with the public,” Bradley Crowell, the commissioner of Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in his remarks.
During a Q&A session with Wagner, Cox said he grew up hearing scary stories about Three Mile Island.
“I was shocked to learn later in life that Three Mile Island actually worked,” he said. “We’ve been fed the wrong story all throughout history.”
Cox said environmentalists are beginning to realize that “the very laws that they championed” prevent them from building clean energy sources.
“We were worried that people might be a little resistant to that,” he said. But the tide is turning, and the Utah governor said he is hopeful.