How about an energy source that can generate almost limitless amounts of power while leaving no carbon footprint whatsoever – come rain or shine, day or night, wind or calm? Now that’s what you could call renewable energy. Or, you could just call it nuclear power.

While nuclear plants supply fully 20% of the nation’s electrical needs, the last such plant in Colorado – Xcel Energy’s Fort Saint Vrain Generating Station on the northeastern plains – ceased operating as a nuclear facility in 1989. Since then, the state and nation have radically realigned energy priorities and committed to zeroing out carbon emissions. Which means now, more than ever, it’s time to restart nuclear power in Colorado.

Some elected officials in Colorado’s No. 3 metro area are calling for such a transition in our energy portfolio. Pueblo County commissioners told state utility regulators last fall that if the state agrees to shut down Xcel’s coal-fired plant in the county early, by 2040 or sooner as environmentalists have urged, then the state ought to let Xcel replace it with a nuclear plant.

“We’ve tried to take a look at the entire gamut of what’s available to us, but (renewable energy) technology is only to a certain point,” Pueblo County Commissioner Garrison Ortiz told Colorado Public Radio in October.

“We’re trying to be realistic, and we’re trying to just look at the feasibility of small modular nuclear technology in the community.” Ortiz and fellow commissioners have filed a statement making that case with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

This week, The Associated Press reported, “Nuclear power is emerging as an answer to fill the gap as states transition away from coal, oil and natural gas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. …”

The AP surveyed all 50 states and the District of Columbia and found that, “a strong majority – about two-thirds – say nuclear, in one fashion or another, will help take the place of fossil fuels.” The AP concluded, “The momentum building behind nuclear power could lead to the first expansion of nuclear reactor construction in the U.S. in more than three decades.”

Even the Biden administration’s U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told the AP in its report that the administration’s bid for zero-carbon electricity – itself, a standard refrain in the president’s party – “means nuclear” as well as other energy sources.

Meaning that even though green-friendlier, Democratic Party-dominant states were among those in the survey that were less likely to go nuclear, doing so has no less than the president’s seal of approval.

Nuclear power’s old stigma and handful of accidents since its inception are rare exceptions that prove the rule of a stellar safety record overall in the U.S. nuclear power industry.

It’s worth remembering that by far the world’s worst nuclear accident, and the only one in which people died as a direct result, occurred in 1986 in the old Soviet Union, at a plant in Chernobyl – built by an authoritarian regime in a crumbling communist economy that cut every corner in the plant’s construction. None of that, of course, would be the case in Colorado.

And the new generation of smaller “modular” nuclear reactors Ortiz refers to seem to hold even more promise.

For the good of our global climate, our local air and our energy economy, it makes sense to develop this pivotal technology as part of Colorado’s energy portfolio.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board