Credit state Sen. Dylan Roberts with a strategic victory in getting nuclear power on the table as an option for generating carbon-free electricity in the state.

We’ve written often about the need to consider nuclear power as a key component in a transition away from fossil fuels. It could seamlessly help communities like Craig take advantage of existing infrastructure to continue to employ people to generate electricity.

As much as we’ve touted the benefits of next-generation reactors that are smaller, safer and produce less radioactive waste than their predecessors, nuclear power has a disastrous PR problem – as in disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima that have largely made nuclear power a nonstarter in conversations about alternatives to emitting carbon to produce electricity.

But Roberts managed to get nuclear power included in a bill he sponsored requiring the Colorado Energy Office to evaluate the feasibility of advanced energy technologies in rural Colorado. Those technologies include geothermal, advanced nuclear, clean hydrogen, carbon capture, wind, solar and long-duration energy storage.

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“I think it’s significant to have the ‘nuclear’ word in state statute in a legislative bill that has now been signed into law,” Roberts said.

He’s right. It’s doubtful nuclear power will ever get its due in this state without some authoritative evaluation and House Bill 1247 is a first step to educate the public on how far nuclear reactor technology has come.

The U.S. Department of Energy notes that 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.

We owe it to ourselves to understand the benefits and risks of nuclear technology. Compared to the threat of climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the treatment and storage of nuclear waste is a much more manageable problem.

As the Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reported recently, far-northwest Colorado is facing looming shutdowns in upcoming years of coal-fired power plants and related losses of coal mining jobs, and western Montrose County recently experienced the loss of a coal plant and mine.

Economic development proponents for these regions have advocated pursuing new energy projects to help make up for the job and tax-revenue losses from the move away from coal power, and to take advantage of existing transmission lines built for transporting coal-fired power to consumers. The idea of nuclear power has been broached in the case of northwestern Colorado and Roberts drove the point home when he spoke last week at the annual economic development summit of the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado.

“They have the land, they have the infrastructure, they have the transmission and they have the willing workforce, and there’s no reason that just because the coal plants are set to retire over the next few years that we should get away from energy development in and of itself,” he said.

If HB 1247 can help destigmatize advanced nuclear technology, it could help the state achieve net-zero carbon status much more quickly than reliance on wind and solar. Nuclear offers stable base-load power that wind and solar do not and without the prohibitive cost of storage or – in Craig’s case – new transmission.

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Board Editorial Board

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