Wyoming Legislature: Cooper looking forward to building Wyoming's future

While State Senate District 20 Senator Ed Cooper (R-Ten Sleep) prepares to head to the general session that begins next Tuesday, Jan. 14, he discussed his interim committee work and bills he will be sponsoring.

INTERIM

Through his work in Senate Minerals, Business & Economic Development Committee (Minerals), Cooper participates as a representative on the Energy Council, a national legislative organization representing 14 energy-producing states and two Canadian provinces.

He said, “What I’m hearing from other states is that they are really looking toward Wyoming for leadership on how to keep these coal-fired plants running. It keeps coming back to the question of carbon capture, usage and storage; how can we get this done and make it work efficiently to keep plants running — not just in Wyoming, but across Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, on down into the Midwest — and those states are all very concerned about this.”

Cooper said the council also addressed topics of enhancing the energy grid nationwide, as well as methods of power generation in the near future. On that topic, the council attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to learn about nuclear fuels.

“It was really educational for me, and I learned a lot about nuclear fuel and the things that can or can’t be done … This newer generation of fuel is changing the way we generate electricity with nuclear energy, making it more efficient and producing less waste,” said Cooper.

To close out his interim work, Cooper was sent by the National Conference of State Legislatures to France along with five other legislators from around the country. He said, “We visited France’s La Hague reprocessing plant in Normandy. They’ve been reprocessing nuclear fuels since the 1970s. Like most countries, they don’t have a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel. For 50 years it has been stored on site there, but this center can take a massive amount of waste and reduce it down to take up much less space — about 4% of the original volume.”

He spoke in detail about the process this center undertakes to reprocess nuclear fuel, saying, “They start out with used fuel rods and their casings, the size of rail cars. They’re used but they aren’t spent; they just can’t use them anymore because they aren’t efficient. There’s still a lot of fuel and a lot of energy left. In an isolated booth, they use robotic machinery to pull the rods out of their casings, allowing them to cool for a period of time, then they slice them into little pieces. Then they run it through a process to extract the fuel material out of the cores and reclaim it to be recycled in a new kind of fuel [MOX, a combination of plutonium and uranium oxides]. When they’re done, what they have left is a small amount of material from the cores that is melted and poured into casks about three feet tall and half as wide. The metal material is similarly placed into casks about the same size. That’s all the waste that they sequester away, and those materials have radioactive half-lives of a couple hundred years instead of a couple thousand years.”

Cooper gained valuable insight from this visit, and compared the nuclear energy industry in France to that in the United States. He said, “In the United States today, all of our used nuclear fuel has to be stored on site because we don’t have a permanent repository yet. We were supposed to have one built in Nevade in 2009, but that got shut down under the Obama Administration … As we move forward with nuclear energy generation, Wyoming is in a position to be at the very forefront of that.”

He spoke about House Bill 16, which is proposing amendments for siting requirements for used nuclear fuel. He said, “The purpose of the bill is to get our language in Wyoming compliant with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s language. We need to be able to talk about these topics, so that in the future we can say we want a nuclear fuel facility in Wyoming. We’re not there yet.”

“As a nation, we need to be looking at how we can reprocess this fuel. We have 90,000 tons of used fuel waste, and it’s growing by 2,000 tons a year, and we have all this nuclear material that is useful that’s just sitting there. It’s just common sense; Why bury 90,000 tons when we can reprocess and bury maybe 4,000 tons instead,” added Cooper.

SPONSORED BILLS

Cooper plans to sponsor four pieces of legislation at the General Session:

Senate File 5, School district vehicles-flashing lights authorized. Cooper said, “A lot of the smaller districts are using suburbans to transport students, and they’ve had a couple of really close calls because they’re not lighted.” This bill will give school district vehicles the authority to use flashing white and amber lights to provide extra visibility to other motorists.”

Senate File 37, Enhanced concealed carry in school zones. This bill would provide enhanced concealed carry licenses, as well as designated places where enhanced concealed carry licenses are required. Cooper stated this bill is unlikely to pass due to a consensus among legislators to leave firearm regulation at private locations to their own discretion, but it will exist as an alternative as conversations about firearms in school zones proceed.

Senate File 87, Prescriptive easement for electricity delivery. Cooper said, “Years ago when we electrified Wyoming, they didn’t worry about easements or rights-of-way. Now, when infrastructure is getting old and land ownership changes, we’re running into issues.” This bill looks to alleviate these issues by providing a way to establish easements for those working on electricity infrastructure to use without running into problems with ownership.

According to the bill, “A prescriptive easement for an electric utility’s delivery system shall be established if the electric utility has used and maintained the delivery system for a period of not less than five years” while meeting certain criteria.

A voyeurism bill, currently not numbered or submitted for introduction, Cooper said the bill would make voyeurism crime offenders subject to penalization by being registered as a sex offender. Wyoming Statute 6-4-304 declares a person guilty of misdemeanor voyeurism when, “They look into an area where someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy without their consent.” Cooper spoke about a case in Wyoming where a voyeurism offender was found to have taken hundreds of photos of a woman in her home without her knowledge. It is Cooper’s belief that a person guilty of such crimes should be placed on the sex offender registry.

UPCOMING SESSION

Cooper said he looks forward to continuing the work started on property tax reform that began at the 2024 Budget Session. He said, “Because of our work during the last session to lay the groundwork, we’ll now be working within the constitution to bring forward some real meaningful changes.”

He added, “We’ll have a lot of social issue bills that come through, they’re big national bills from think tanks like the Freedom Caucus. A lot of those are good bills, but they need to be adapted for the Wyoming Constitution, otherwise we can end up passing bills that are borderline unconstitutional. We need to be careful of that, and that requires some original thought from locals rather than following the national think tanks in Washington, D.C.”

He continued his point, saying, “We’ve got to give this new leadership in the Senate and the House the benefit of the doubt. Everybody is looking for the same thing here — what’s best for the state of Wyoming. There’s just different ways to go about it. Like I was saying earlier, a lot of the new leaderships’ ideas are fed to them from think tanks in Washington, D.C., and I think there needs to be more original, local thought put into them to make sure that we don’t run amok with our constitution. If we can’t compromise on that, then it’s going to be tough. Other than that, I’m willing to work with them; I think they’re good people and I’m looking forward to a new frontier in Wyoming Legislature.”