Colorado was given a clear opportunity earlier this year. On Jan. 28, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking potential hosts for Nuclear Energy Innovation Campuses — an early-stage process designed to identify states serious about shaping the next generation of energy development. What followed was not hesitation from local communities or industry, but mobilization. Counties engaged. Legislators convened. Stakeholders organized. A regional response took shape — substantive, coordinated, and backed by growing support.

And yet, at the state level, a different posture emerged. Despite early awareness, the response has narrowed over time — constrained in scope, cautious in tone, and increasingly structured in a way that raises a more consequential question: whether Colorado intends to compete in this space at all.

That divergence — between local initiative and state restraint — is not procedural. It is directional.

An RFI is not a commitment. It authorizes nothing, builds nothing, and obligates no one. It is the government’s way of asking a simple question: What is possible?

Yet, even at this preliminary stage, there are signs that Colorado’s answer may be less inquiry than evasion.

Not openly, of course. The language of participation remains intact. The forms will be completed. The process will be observed. But process can be used for two very different ends: to explore possibilities — or to foreclose them. Increasingly, it appears Colorado is flirting with the latter.

This is how disengagement happens in modern governance — not through open refusal, but through the structuring of response.

Frame the questions narrowly enough, emphasize the obstacles heavily enough, signal sufficient regulatory hostility, and the outcome is assured without ever having to say so. The state can claim participation while ensuring that no serious participant takes it seriously. It is, in effect, non-participation masquerading as prudence.

The cost of such a posture is not immediate. It is strategic.

While Colorado debates the terms of its own participation, other states have read the moment differently. Utah has moved decisively. Tennessee, predictably, is not waiting. Idaho has long understood what is at stake. They recognize that advanced nuclear technologies — small modular reactors, microreactors, next-generation fuel systems — are not theoretical curiosities. They are the next phase of energy development.

And they intend to host it.

Colorado, by contrast, risks becoming what it has not historically been: a bystander.

This is particularly striking given the state’s self-conception as a leader in clean energy. Leadership, however, is not a slogan. It is a willingness to confront tradeoffs honestly. Wind and solar are valuable, but intermittent. Storage remains limited at scale. A modern grid requires firm, dispatchable power. This is not ideological. It is physical.

Advanced nuclear is one of the few technologies capable of meeting that requirement while aligning with emissions goals.

One need not be an enthusiast to recognize this. Skepticism is not only permissible — it is necessary. But skepticism properly understood leads to engagement, not avoidance. If there are legitimate concerns about safety, waste, cost, or regulation — and there are — the RFI is precisely where those concerns should be interrogated.

To withdraw at the outset is not caution. It is surrender of influence.

There is, as well, an economic reality that deserves attention. A Nuclear Energy Innovation Campus is not merely an energy facility. It is an ecosystem: research institutions, workforce development, private capital, and technological commercialization. It is the difference between importing the future and helping to build it.

Colorado possesses many of the prerequisites — universities, talent, proximity to national laboratories. What it lacks, at least in this moment, is clarity of intent.

And markets are exquisitely sensitive to intent.

If the signal sent is that Colorado will engage only on terms that preclude actual development, then investors, innovators, and federal partners will draw the obvious conclusion. They will go elsewhere. The opportunity will not vanish. It will relocate — to jurisdictions that understand that early-stage engagement is not risk, but leverage.

That this moment arrives alongside a serious, locally driven proposal — one that, by some accounts, would place Colorado among the top contenders — only sharpens the contrast.

Confidence in process is difficult to sustain when the substance itself appears unevenly understood.

There are those who will argue that restraint is warranted. They are not wrong. Nuclear energy, like all serious infrastructure, demands rigorous oversight, transparency, and public accountability. These are not obstacles to be avoided; they are disciplines to be applied.

But there is a difference between discipline and preemption.

Discipline asks hard questions and remains in the room for the answers. Preemption ensures the answers are never reached.

If Colorado has concluded, as a matter of policy, that it wants no role in the future of nuclear innovation, that position should be stated plainly and defended openly. It is a legitimate argument, even if a contestable one. But that is not what is occurring here.

What is occurring is more subtle — and more consequential.

It is the quiet construction of a process whose outcome is predetermined. A form of participation designed to guarantee non-participation. A decision not to decide, presented as prudence.

The people of Colorado deserve better than that.

They deserve a state willing to engage the future on its merits — to ask, to test, to challenge, and ultimately to choose. Not a state that removes itself from consideration while maintaining the appearance of involvement.

An RFI does not build a campus. It does something more important. It determines who will be in the room when such decisions are made.

History will not record how many forms were completed or how carefully they were worded. It will record who showed up — and who did not.

Colorado should consider carefully which side of that ledger it intends to occupy.

Michael A. Hancock is a retired high-tech business executive, software engineer and U.S. Air Force veteran who lives in Aurora. He writes a twice-monthly column for The Denver Gazette.