In the super-charged partisan atmosphere of an election year, one contentious issue has emerged as a beacon of bipartisanship: Nuclear power. Both Republicans and Democrats backed Denver congresswoman Diana DeGette’s bill facilitating the construction of new reactors with cutting-edge designs, and last month President Biden signed it into law. But today’s nuclear cheerleaders could learn something from the past — so we are sharing a short audio documentary that our producer Paul Karolyi created about Colorado’s first and still only nuclear power plant, Fort St. Vrain, back in 2019.

This audio documentary originally aired on the podcast Range & Slope and an abbreviated version aired on Colorado Public Radio on August 29, 2019. The song featured at the end of this story is an original composition by Jesse Wooten of Creekbed. 

Paul also recommends this recent article about the current debate over bringing nuclear power back to Colorado from Allen Best at the local energy blog Big Pivots. Even if Colorado does build a new reactor or convert an old coal plant to nuclear, we wouldn’t be the first state to test out a next-gen nuclear reactor. Billionaire Bill Gates was in Wyoming in June to break ground on a new reactor being built by TerraPower.

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