After years of dismissing the idea of promoting nuclear-energy development in Colorado, some legislative Democrats are coming around on it — and late Thursday, they joined with Republicans for the first time to advance a bill that would incentivize the energy source.
House Bill 1040 would redefine nuclear energy as a clean energy, which in turn would make nuclear projects eligible for special clean-energy project financing and would allow utilities to include them in their minimum mandatory clean-energy portfolio. It passed the House Energy & Environment Committee by an 8-5 vote after a lengthy hearing and goes next to the full House for debate.
Republican Sen. Larry Liston of Colorado Springs has led the push for a redefinition of energy generated by nuclear fission, but over the past two sessions, his bill died in its first committee, taking on the feel of a quixotic effort that couldn’t gain bipartisan traction. However, Liston worked fervently to get Democratic cohorts on board after the 2024 session and found a major one in Rep. Alex Valdez of Denver, a solar-industry executive who has authored numerous bills promoting or requiring greener energy.
Colorado state Sens. Janice Marchman and Larry Liston invite colleagues to come to a Nuclear Energy Caucus meeting earlier this month.
Valdez, who is cosponsoring HB 1040 with GOP Rep. Ty Winter of Trinidad in the House, said Thursday that after beginning his career as a nuclear-energy opponent, he’s come full circle and now believes it necessary to reach the state’s emissions-reduction goals. With Colorado having to boost electricity production substantially, nuclear is a proven-safe option used already at 94 sites across America and is preferable to the amount of natural-gas plants Colorado otherwise would have to operate to meet growing demands, he said.
Environmental and economic benefits
“We obviously have air-quality problems. We obviously have environmental problems. One thing I’ve learned across the course of my career is you have to adjust,” Valdez told committee members. “We need to be looking at every possible clean option we have … And if you look at where we are today, this is one of the best options we have.”
Winter, a seemingly strange bedfellow for the environmentally focused Valdez, came from a different angle, saying that nuclear must be part of an all-of-the-above energy policy that restores the jobs and severance taxes lost by increased state regulation of oil and gas. He emphasized that small modular reactors are particularly needed in southeast Colorado, where Xcel Energy will close the Comanche coal-fired power plant in 2031 and take with it some $200 million in annual economic impact that a nuclear plant could help to offset.
Unions including the Colorado AFL-CIO and Rocky Mountain Pipe Trades sided with Valdez and Winter, saying that construction of nuclear facilities, aided by federal funding, would create high-paying jobs that use the local labor that many new renewable facilities eschew. And Valdez, along with a bevy of nuclear-sector officials, argued that despite the lingering memories of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, nuclear energy has never lead to an injury or fatality on U.S. soil.
“It complements weather-dependent renewable technologies well,” said Dan West, senior Western regional policy manager for Clean Air Task Force, noting like many others that production of nuclear energy is emissions-free. “It also presents a viable option for communities transitioning away from coal.”
Green advocates push back on nuclear
In 2023, Colorado state Rep. Alex Valdez discusses his bill to ensure that new multifamily construction is equipped to offer more electric-vehicle charging ports.
Despite support the support of CATF and some other environmental groups for the bill, though, most environmental groups who testified Thursday decried the proposal for promoting a form of energy that they consider unsafe and unclean, given the necessity to dispose spent and radioactive fuel. Opponents from GreenLatinos to several physicians said there is no plan to get rid of the nuclear waste created by fission, and several also worried that new nuclear plants could become prime targets for terrorist attacks that could make hundreds of square miles uninhabitable.
Paul Sherman, climate manager for Conservation Colorado, also claimed that nuclear energy projects are not feasible, noting that while solar-energy production costs dropped 90% between 2009 and 2020, nuclear energy costs rose 33%. In addition to saddling potential customers with high bills, pricey plants could compete with more cost-efficient solar and wind projects for limited incentives, taking resources from them, others said.
“While it doesn’t create direct emissions, nuclear is not clean and shouldn’t be labeled as such,” said Alana Miller, Colorado climate and energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This technology is risky and expensive and a distraction from the proven technologies we have before us.”
Key Democrats determine bill’s fate
A handful of committee Democrats agreed with the criticism, saying that while they too want to reduce emissions, they could not get past questions they have regarding the safety of nuclear plants. Several noted that nuclear projects could proceed in Colorado even if this bill were to die; they just wouldn’t get the financial breaks or consideration as part of a clean-energy portfolio that might push otherwise reluctant companies to undertake them.
“We should not be using incentives, which are our taxpayer dollars … on unproven, expensive energies that generate radioactive waste for thousands of years,” said Rep. Jenny Willford, D-Northglenn. She also decried a provision in the bill that would allow utilities to study nuclear-energy production and pass those costs along through customers’ bills.
But Republicans focused on the jobs that small modular reactors could create — 100 to 200 per facility, in addition to temporary construction jobs, estimated Meghan Dollar, Colorado Chamber of Commerce senior vice president of government relations. And they pulled with them four committee Democrats — Valdez and Reps. Sean Camacho, Amy Paschal and Manny Rutinel — who said they too consider nuclear to be clean energy and necessary to meeting state environmental goals.
“This is about more than energy. It’s about economic survival,” Winter said. “I think this is worth a bigger discussion.”