Building a small-scale nuclear power plant to replace Craig Station coal-fired plant after it closes in 2030 makes all the sense in the world.

Both the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado and the Garfield County commissioners have now endorsed the idea and are pursuing federal funding to explore the concept. We wholeheartedly agree with this effort for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the Craig Station power plant currently supports good jobs for the rural communities in that part of the state. Closing it down will have major negative economic impacts that should be avoided if at all possible. The Department of Energy has identified nuclear power as a way to benefit communities like Craig, according to reporting by The Daily Sentinel’s Dennis Webb.

According to information provided by DOE about the opportunity, “The Office of Nuclear Energy will work with partners to connect and interact with underserved communities that could benefit from nuclear energy projects to ensure that the growth produced by clean energy projects is equitably delivered to all.”

AGNC’s chairman, Garfield County Commissioner Mike Samson, said that the benefits of building a nuclear plant there, as it has been explained to him, include the skilled workforce that’s available there and the transmission lines that are already in place to deliver power from the plant.

The small modular nuclear power system contemplated for Craig also offers the potential for significant cost savings compared to the larger plants we’ve traditionally built.

You may be thinking, “That’s all well and good, but isn’t nuclear power dangerous and bad for the environment?” The answer is, not really.

Nuclear power has had a couple of high-profile incidents like the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Despite these incidents, nuclear power is actually remarkably safe and these next-generation, small-scale plants are even safer.

According to the DOE, small modular reactors are being designed with new safety features that make them secure from accidents, deliberate attacks and reduce the amount of nuclear fuel that has to be transported to and from a power plant.

As for the environment, compared to the threat of climate change driven by fossil fuel emissions, the treatment and storage of nuclear waste is a much more manageable problem.

Nuclear also offers that stable base-load power generation that solar and wind do not, without expensive storage systems. That’s something we will need to truly get to a net-zero carbon system.

As we’ve written many times, we need to be transitioning to non-carbon based power generation. We should be agnostic about what form that power generation comes in.

Where solar makes sense we should build solar, where hydro-power makes sense we should build hydro, and where nuclear power makes sense we should build nuclear. We think nuclear makes a lot of sense in Craig.

The Garfield commissioners’ letter to the Office of Nuclear Energy asks, “Can we leverage northwest Colorado’s energy infrastructure for new technologies? Moreover, as these communities have done for decades, is there an opportunity to provide the baseload capacity and energy reliability that Colorado needs through northwest Colorado?”

The DOE’s answer should absolutely be, “Yes.”

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel editorial board