If you have a snazzy new idea for miniature nuclear power plants in the middle of Denver International Airport that could be forced to store their spent nuclear waste onsite for centuries, maybe check with the neighbors first?
Denver’s mayor and airport chief touted a whiz-bang, $1.5 million exploratory study of small, “modular” nuclear power plants buried underground somewhere on DIA property to fuel decades of economic and passenger growth. The rah-rah news conference happened to be on a Wednesday that was also the 80th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
By that Friday, the study was back on the shelf, not to be revisited until city and airport officials completed some of the explaining they needed to do for local city council members and residents, who said they’d never been consulted on the (big) (radioactive) idea.
“I’m proud to say that community advocacy still works, but you really have to be within the community,” said City Council member Stacie Gilmore, whose northeast District 11 includes DIA. “People are paying attention, and they don’t trust the airport, and they don’t trust this administration, unfortunately.”
Gilmore said her constituents’ objections and questions were the same as those of reporters and environmental justice advocates who queried DIA chief Phil Washington and Mayor Mike Johnston at the Aug. 6 news conference launching the study: Why waste money on an unproven, enormously expensive, extremely toxic nuclear power plant, with no place in the nation accepting the eventual radioactive waste, in a spot with hundreds of thousands of neighbors and 100 million visiting passengers a year?
Especially at a time when Johnston is having to fire hundreds of current Denver city employees to make up for a major budget deficit? The airport can argue its funding for the study comes from airline and other fees, not city tax money, but still, opponents said … the optics?
“The optics are really crazy,” Gilmore said Tuesday. The date of the nuclear-curious news conference did not escape the notice of Gilmore, who has family members with parents who were in Japan when the first A-bomb dropped. “And it was just tone deaf to anything about the community, or the close proximity to Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge and its Superfund site,” Gilmore said.
An airport communique after the study was suspended Aug. 8 said, “The delay will allow DEN the opportunity to provide an overview of the proposal to the community in District 11 and beyond based on feedback from Council members provided last week in committee. Our goal is to present this idea to the community, listen to their feedback, and understand what they would like to see included in the feasibility study.”
In its defense, DIA continued, “Typically, there would not be a community outreach component before or during the RFP phase of a study. Community engagement would take place once a study has started so that we can get meaningful feedback and input. However, since it was requested, we are happy to do so.”
In initially announcing the study, DIA’s Washington said the fast-growing airport and local hotel and industry development would be bumping up against local capacity to generate and transmit needed power in coming years. Johnston emphasized research into whether the modular nuclear plants would work at DIA was only one way the city would continue the transition to clean energy sources. (A law passed by the 2025 legislature officially made nuclear energy “clean” under Colorado rules and therefore eligible for government grants and other favorable treatment.)
An “all of the above” approach is required for Denver, DIA officials say, predicting the nation’s third-busiest airport will surpass 100 million annual passengers in a few years, and 120 million passengers by 2045.
DIA has already hosted construction of 30 megawatts of solar panels and will continue to entertain ideas for more solar and other fuels cleaner than traditional natural gas or coal generation, officials said. But the airport’s energy draw is already 40MW and growing. Planned modular reactors can be shipped on the back of a semitrailer, and “stacked” with each other as demand grows, they said.
Clean energy advocates immediately countered that none of the new generation of small modular reactors are actually plugged in and working yet, and that only a small handful of new nuclear power units have been approved nationwide since the 1970s. Cost overruns are the norm with nuclear, they add, and all existing nuclear power plants in the U.S. must store their highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel onsite because no federal repository has been opened.
“Denver International Airport sort of has shown recently that they’re so eager for development that they’re not doing smart planning and smart growth for it,” Gilmore said. “It just is so disrespectful to the community, and I think folks are fed up out here feeling like the airport is king and we’re just the peasants that live around it, and we deal with the plane noise, the air pollution, the traffic and everything else, and they don’t have to do anything about it.”