Cotter Corporation NSL Cañon City, Colorado

It won’t be long before the cherry blossoms burst out in Cañon City, adding a special glow to the place.

There’s another kind of glow the town’s residents have been trying to get rid of for years — the radioactive aura emanating from the Cotter Corp.'s highly polluted property. The town and Fremont County are mostly unified in trying to keep the Cotter genie in the bottle by stopping it from expanding its operation at a site designated as a Superfund location by the Environmental Protection Agency long ago.

House Bill 1348, which soon will reach the floor of the Colorado House, is designed to do that. It has bipartisan support, but the issue is about more than just a badly placed nuclear waste pit in Cañon City.

As the home of increasingly valuable uranium deposits, Colorado is bound to play a role when nuclear power makes a comeback. Cotter’s safety record is dismal and the Cañon City-based Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste CCAT) succeeded in blocking shipments of nuclear waste from New Jersey.

CCAT is a driving force behind the legislation, but it doesn’t expect to shut down the nuclear power industry.

“Colorado historically has led the way in this industry, and we need to continue to do that,” said Jeri Fry, CCAT co-chair. Fry says he thinks it’s inevitable nuclear power will bounce back, “but it needs to happen smart.”

That means tracking all of the costs. Fry said the nuclear power debate often is focused on how to dispose of nuclear waste, ignoring the “front-end” costs linked to uranium milling.

“The front-end cost is never what they talk about,” she said. “We are the front end. It’s in my backyard.”

After the Three-Mile Island accident, U.S. demand for yellowcake, the raw material used to fuel nuclear power plants, dropped as some plants closed and no new plants were built. To survive, Cotter’s Cañon City operation looked for other things to do, including getting into the nuclear waste disposal business.

By 2006, the Cotter plant stopped making yellowcake entirely. In the meantime Cotter fought protracted battle over trying to move radioactive waste from Maywood, N.J. The company saw nuclear waste disposal as a natural side business — after all, some waste from the Manhattan Project had found its way to Cañon City many years before.

Cotter hopes to reopen the uranium mill in 2014, accepting ore from the Mount Taylor uranium mine in New Mexico. Fry and her allies are hoping to at least delay that move by forcing Cotter to clean up first.

A Fremont County employee, Fry acknowledged that her efforts to rein in Cotter “has turned into a lifestyle.”

CCAT has received awards for its activism, but more importantly, it has established credibility with lawmakers who appear poised to remove that unwanted glow.