A Deeply Green City Confronts Its Energy Needs and Nuclear Worries

This city takes pride in being green, from its official motto, “Where renewal is a way of life,” to its Climate Wise energy program, which helps local businesses reduce the carbon emissions that scientists say can contribute to global warming.

But now two proposed energy projects are exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront in years to come as the tangled nuances of thinking globally come back to bite.

Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.

The solar project, called AVA Solar, plans to use a new manufacturing process developed at Colorado State University here to make panels for electricity generation, and will use cadmium — a hazardous metal linked to cancer — as part of the industrial process.

The company that would run the proposed uranium mine, Powertech Uranium, would like to drill down through part of an aquifer about 10 miles northeast of town using what the company says would be state-of-the-art drilling technology to extract fuel for nuclear-generated electricity.

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