No, Douglas County Is Not Building a Nuclear Reactor. Here Is What the Commissioners Actually Did

If you heard that Douglas County is planning nuclear reactors, here is what actually happened: at a June 30 work session, the county commissioners asked staff to find out what it would cost to study whether small nuclear reactors could ever make sense here. No vote. No site. No vendor. No reactor. A request for a price tag on a feasibility study, which is a study about whether to do a study. That gap, between what was done and how it sounds, is worth closing carefully, because the underlying question is genuinely big for this county. We read the county's own 17-page staff memo so you do not have to.

What the commissioners actually said

Chair Abe Laydon supplied both the ambition and the ceiling. He called nuclear's capacity for energy resilience "massive," balanced against "human health, safety and welfare," and then drew the line that should headline every version of this story: "I do not envision creating a Department of Nuclear Power in the county. It's to see if we can become a place that a business could look to relocate to." Commissioner George Teal was blunter about the sequencing: "We can't even talk about having any kind of power generation that would include an SMR until we do our own study." Commissioner Kevin Van Winkle supported gathering information while cautioning against committing significant money before the study's scope is right-sized.

Note what that adds up to: this is an economic development play, not a power-plant plan. Douglas County is not a utility and cannot build a reactor for you; most of the county buys its electricity from CORE Electric Cooperative, which has no announced role in any of this. What the county can do is decide whether it wants to court the industries that increasingly come bundled with small reactors: data centers, microchip fabs, advanced manufacturing. The staff memo names the driver plainly, citing Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta's nuclear investments, and argues Douglas County's aerospace workforce overlaps with the nuclear sector's needs. The draft study scope even asks what it would take to attract SMR manufacturers, not just reactors.

The county's own memo lists the downsides

Here is the unusual part, and to the county's credit: the memo is candid in ways government documents rarely are. It attaches a February 2026 Harvard School of Public Health study finding that counties closer to nuclear plants experienced higher cancer mortality rates. It concedes that "the public sector does not have an effective way to dispose of nuclear waste, long term." And it invokes Rocky Flats, the Front Range's own cautionary tale, as an example of a site that remains closed to development decades after cleanup. It also notes that under current federal rules, written for traditional large plants, much of Douglas County is restricted from nuclear site development at all, which is why staff recommend waiting for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's new advanced-reactor regulations due at the end of this year. Translation: nothing meaningful can move before 2027 regardless of anyone's enthusiasm.

The context: DougCo is late to this party

Colorado reclassified nuclear as "clean energy" by law in March 2025. Colorado Springs Utilities is a year into its own feasibility review with national-lab support. Pueblo's advisory committee already recommended small reactors as the favored replacement for the Comanche 3 coal plant. Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, fifteen minutes from the county line, is slated to host a one-megawatt Radiant microreactor around 2028 under a Defense Department program. And Denver International Airport postponed its own SMR study after public backlash over a lack of outreach, a failure the DougCo memo studied explicitly and promises to avoid with an education hub, an open house, and a feedback form before decisions get made.

That last promise is the one worth holding onto. The local Douglas County Lantern, which broke the story two days before the session, criticized the board for scheduling controversial items during holiday weeks when attendance is hard, and a work session has no public comment period at all. Residents' first reactions, in CBS Colorado's street interviews, ran from "the future of the world" to something "out of a sci-fi movie." Both of those people would benefit from reading the memo, which is more sober than either take.

What we are watching

Four things, and we will report each as it lands: what the cost estimates come back at and when this returns to the board; the date and content of the earlier work session where this first surfaced, which drew no coverage; whether CORE Electric has been approached at all; and whether the promised public open house actually happens before money is spent. The county studied how DIA fumbled this exact conversation. Now we get to see if it learned.

For the fire-and-power context that keeps framing this summer, see our coverage of the county's $4.2 million firefighting air base and the Stage 2 restrictions still in effect.