"Mr. Udall, would you work to locate a nuclear power plant in Colorado?"

Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall: "If we meet all the standards, yes."

Even Bob Schaffer, Udall's Republican opponent, gave a more cautious answer to the same question during a 9News debate. "Maybe," Schaffer replied. "It's a hypothetical. If it's a good plan, I'll support it."

Udall's answer was surprising given his longtime alliance with environmentalists who mostly have despised nuclear power. Yet it was not a momentary lapse. A minute earlier, 9News' Adam Schrager had asked the candidates if they favored "expanding nuclear power to help solve the energy crisis." Udall and Schaffer both said, "Yes."

What's up with the congressman from the 2nd District? There are two possibilities. Either he's indulging in election-year rhetoric to neutralize Republican charges that he's indifferent to the energy squeeze, or he's another convert to nuclear power as a practical response to global warming.

Thursday he told the Rocky editorial board that his position on nuclear power had indeed evolved. The reason: as suspected, global warming. Nuclear is carbon-free energy, while its defects - as Udall sees them - are outweighed by the perils of potential climate change.

Still, the Democrat remains a rather grudging fan of nuclear power. He opposes, unfortunately, the Yucca Mountain respository for nuclear waste and waxes with heartfelt passion on energy only when the topic is wind or solar. Maybe we can stoke his enthusiasm for nuclear power (Schaffer doesn't seem to need the same nudge) with a surprising finding from an economist at Tufts University, as reported by John Tierney of The New York Times.

"After estimating the costs and factoring out the hefty tax breaks for different forms of low-carbon energy," Tierney wrote, "[economist Gilbert Metcalf] estimates that new nuclear plants could produce electricity more cheaply than windmills, solar power or 'clean coal' plants."

Construction costs are notoriously hard to estimate, so new nuclear plants could end up being much more costly than Metcalf anticipates. Still, green activists are prone to minimize the costs and subsidies of renewables, too - as well as the environmental impacts.

Federal land managers are already balking at the extravagant requests for acreage on which to locate solar panels. As The Christian Science Monitor said last month, "The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has received some 200 applications to build solar plants on federal land in recent years. In California alone, there are 80 proposals involving 700,000 acres."

Says the BLM's program manager for renewable energy in California: "I don't see us putting 80 solar projects on BLM land, there's no way. I don't see us putting 30. And I hope the solar industry hears me on that."

Clashes over clean energy projects will become ever more common - and are yet one more reason to give nuclear a fresh look, too.

Carbon skepticism

Susan Solomon, a scientist sharing the Nobel Prize for work on global warming, told the Governor's Conference on Managing Drought and Climate Risk this week that she is "optimistic" that international efforts will slash carbon dioxide emissions.

Well, to each her own. Actually, there is a lot of evidence suggesting that skepticism is a much more realistic attitude toward the prospect of slashing greenhouse emissions in the near future - or, for that matter, for many years.

Consider this recent news from The Washington Post: "According to the new report from the Global Carbon Project, an Australian-based international consortium of scientists, 8.47 gigatons of emissions were released in 2007, up 2.9 percent over 2006." And this "buildup of carbon emissions in the atmosphere is outpacing the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Much of the emissions increase of course comes from developing countries such as China and India, who have no intention of slowing their growth to curry Western favor. But even the European Union, allegedly far greener than the U.S., has balked. As The Economist reported this month, "Almost every [EU] country has found reasons why the climate-change promises may be impossible to meet in their current form."

In truth, we haven't nearly turned the corner toward serious carbon-dioxide reductions and probably won't without better technology. No amount of goodwill and green awareness can overcome the political imperative of keeping economies afloat.

Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.