For much of the twentieth century, Wyoming powered the United States by extracting coal and sending it elsewhere. From the postwar boom through the early 2000s, trains left the Powder River Basin loaded with fuel that kept distant lights on, factories running, and bases operational. Wyoming’s contribution to national power was tangible and legible. Today, the connection is less visible but no less consequential. Wyoming still underwrites American power through electricity systems that support data centers, advanced nuclear projects, and the digital infrastructure tied to military command and control and strategic deterrence.
Most analysis of gray-zone competition and irregular warfare remains biased toward federal actors and distant theaters. Crucially, however, state and local decision-making around electricity, data centers, and nuclear supply chains has become a lynchpin for irregular competition. Wyoming is the quintessential case, but it is also a warning. Across the United States, county commissions, public utility commissions, state energy offices, and economic development boards are translating national ambitions into physical reality, or quietly preventing them from doing so. For irregular warfare practitioners, the lesson is straightforward: strategic advantage increasingly depends on civilian systems that enable military power, including energy grids, digital infrastructure, and industrial supply chains. These systems often exist at the state and local levels.
Electricity, Data Centers, and the Gray Zone in Wyoming
Wyoming did not seek to become a node in digital competition. Since 2012, Cheyenne has hosted the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, a high-performance computing facility built with federal and state support to serve atmospheric research. The current rush for data centers took shape in the late 2010s and picked up steam after 2020, when local economic development officials began actively courting hyperscale facilities. They pursued them for familiar reasons: construction jobs, long-term technical employment, a bigger tax base, and steady utility revenue. These proposals were evaluated in spreadsheets, not threat assessments.
What those spreadsheets did not capture was what data centers actually do. They convert electricity into computational power that runs artificial intelligence models, cloud platforms, logistics systems, and increasingly, military and intelligence applications. In Cheyenne, these civilian facilities draw from the same grid that serves F.E. Warren Air Force Base, home to the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missile force. In that setting, power reliability becomes an enabling condition for deterrence and readiness.
In effect, Cheyenne’s electrical grid became intertwined with national security. The levers that shape power reliability are not controlled by generals or intelligence agencies, but by public utility commissions, city councils, and economic development boards. Decisions about substations, transmission upgrades, backup generation, and interconnection timelines determine whether cloud platforms, AI training clusters, and defense-adjacent compute systems can operate continuously or stall. Strategic influence becomes powered by energy markets, supply chains, regulatory timelines, and public processes. Over time, local zoning hearings and utility votes accumulate into strategic implications.
For irregular warfare practitioners, this illustrates how state and local energy governance can shape military-relevant digital infrastructure long before any crisis makes those choices visible.
From Coal Retirements to Nuclear Reconsideration
As coal-fired generation retires, Wyoming communities face concrete economic challenges: lost jobs, shrinking tax bases, and the risk of grid instability. Local leaders frame these problems in fiscal terms, not geopolitical ones. Yet the solutions they pursue carry national consequences.
Advanced nuclear power offers firm, continuous electricity capable of replacing retiring coal while preserving transmission infrastructure and industrial sites. TerraPower’s Natrium reactor near Kemmerer, announced in 2021 under Governor Mark Gordon and sited beside a retiring coal facility, reflects stable economic opportunity and electrical capacity. For Lincoln County, the project promises employment and infrastructure continuity. For federal policymakers, it represents a test case for deploying advanced reactors that could support grid resilience, data-center growth, and domestic energy security.
The project’s path to Wyoming was shaped by forces well beyond the state. Earlier in the decade, TerraPower had planned to build a prototype reactor in China through a partnership with a state-owned nuclear firm. That effort collapsed in 2019 after U.S. technology transfer restrictions intervened, pushing the company’s advanced reactor ambitions back inside the United States. When the Department of Energy selected TerraPower in 2020 for a major Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, Wyoming emerged as a politically viable and economically motivated host.
Federal backing through DOE signals national interest, but the project’s fate is largely determined in Wyoming. Workforce housing, water and sewer capacity, road access, permitting coordination, and community acceptance all sit at the state and local level. National security outcomes emerge indirectly from decisions made to balance budgets and sustain communities rather than to counter an adversary. The ability of advanced reactors to provide resilient power to data centers, military installations, and emergency response systems depends on whether state and county governments can sustain projects through years of permitting, construction, and public scrutiny.
Wyoming’s nuclear story shows how local economic adaptation can enable or constrain national strategic options without invoking emergency powers or security authorities.
Supply Chains Beneath the Surface
Nuclear deployment is governed less by reactor design than by the supply chains that make reactors possible. Fuel fabrication, specialized components, regulatory capacity, and a limited skilled workforce determine which projects advance.
Wyoming’s role extends below the surface. The state holds significant uranium resources and other critical minerals that support both nuclear systems and data center hardware. Control over fuel fabrication shapes reactor timelines and long-term viability. For Wyoming officials, fuel facilities mean jobs and diversification. For national planners, they represent control over a strategic chokepoint in the nuclear ecosystem.
Rebuilding nuclear supply chains requires sustained investment in people and institutions. Engineers, welders, inspectors, and regulators with nuclear experience remain in short supply. Capital can accelerate some processes, but it cannot quickly rebuild capacity lost over decades. In irregular warfare terms, these supply chains function as contested terrain. Delays in fuel, components, or skilled labor can reshape deployment timelines as effectively as more visible forms of pressure.
For practitioners, the lesson is straightforward: infrastructure and fuel supply are not technical background conditions, but rather terrain on which strategic timelines succeed or fail.
When Process Becomes Power: Radiant, BWXT, and Adaptation
Wyoming’s experience shows how irregular competition plays out through process rather than confrontation. The proposed Radiant microreactor manufacturing facility outside Bar Nunn did not fail because regulators rejected it or because the technology proved unviable. It failed in 2025 because of regulatory uncertainty layered on top of public opposition and narrative friction.
Radiant Industries, a California-based firm developing factory-built Kaleidos microreactors, proposed building a microreactor manufacturing facility in Natrona County, using Wyoming-mined uranium and returning spent fuel for refueling. That model collided with the state’s decades-old statutory ban on storing spent nuclear fuel—a ban only narrowly excepted in 2022 for TerraPower’s Natrium project, which operates in state. Throughout 2025, Radiant sought legislative clarity, but a committee tabled the bill that would have provided it.
That delay proved decisive. In October 2025, Radiant announced it would build its first facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee instead, citing regulatory certainty as the deciding factor. Friction alone was sufficient to redirect a strategically relevant manufacturing capability.
In response, Wyoming adapted institutions that broadened public engagement and shifted focus from reactor manufacturing to upstream fuel supply, a less visible but more durable strategic asset. In December 2025, Governor Gordon approved $100 million in state funding for BWXT’s TRISO nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Gillette, following advocacy by the Wyoming Business Council and the Wyoming Energy Authority. BWXT already manufactures TRISO fuel for Project Pele and other advanced-reactor applications. Framed publicly as economic development, the Gillette decision anchored domestic fuel capacity for advanced reactors relevant to both civilian energy and defense applications.
The Radiant and BWXT sequence shows that subnational institutions can learn inside gray-zone competition, shifting from politically fragile projects to chokepoints with greater strategic durability. In each case, power is exercised quietly and sometimes often unintentionally by those who never set out to wield it.
Implications for Practice
For federal practitioners, the first implication is conceptual. Public utility commissions, state energy offices, and economic development boards should be treated as relevant actors in gray-zone competition rather than peripheral stakeholders. They help determine whether data centers receive reliable power, whether transmission upgrades move forward, and whether advanced nuclear projects survive years of public scrutiny.
The second implication is institutional. National strategy increasingly depends on infrastructure that is permitted, financed, and staffed below the federal level, yet the mechanisms connecting national security institutions to those subnational decision-makers remain thin and ad hoc. DOE’s State Energy Security Plan guidance already recognizes that state-level planning sits at the center of resilience and risk mitigation. What remains underdeveloped is a routine way for federal security institutions to translate strategic requirements into relationships, incentives, and planning cycles that make sense to governors’ offices, county commissions, and local utilities.
The third implication is operational. Interconnection queues, infrastructure grants, housing capacity, water and sewer upgrades, and permitting delays should be understood as gray-zone terrain rather than technical enablers. These mechanisms determine whether electricity, compute, and nuclear supply chains scale on time or break under pressure. Practitioners do not need to militarize those processes to take them seriously. They need to recognize that infrastructure timelines and regulatory friction can shape strategic outcomes as effectively as more familiar tools of coercion.
The final implication is geographic. What is happening in Wyoming is likely to recur across other interior states where legacy energy assets, rising electricity demand, and subnational authority intersect. States that host data centers, advanced reactor demonstrations, or fuel-cycle investments will face versions of the same question: whether local institutions can translate economic development logic into resilient execution before delay, fragmentation, or political friction redirects the opportunity elsewhere.
Conclusion: Wyoming on the Quiet Front Line
Wyoming’s journey from coal to code to reactors illustrates how strategic competition now operates below the threshold of armed conflict. Electricity, data centers, and nuclear fuel supply are not battlefield assets, but they shape the balance of power in an era defined by digital systems and indirect influence.
The state’s experience shows where this competition unfolds. Utility hearings, zoning meetings, development boards, and state loan votes determine whether critical infrastructure is built, delayed, or redirected. As the United States competes in a crowded global environment, success will depend not only on federal strategy or military capability, but on the capacity of subnational institutions to execute, adapt, and endure. In that sense, Wyoming is not just a case study. It is part of the operational map.
Connor T. Christensen is an Economic Policy & Research Advisor with the State of Wyoming. A former US Navy servicemember with over a decade of professional experience, he has worked extensively on research initiatives spanning Colombia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Ecuador, and Turkey, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. Connor holds a Master of Public Policy and a Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, combining expertise in economic development, international conflict resolution, and regional studies.
Main image: "Pronghorn-Anticline" by USFWS Mountain Prairie is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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