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PUEBLO, COLO. -- Nuclear power will not be coming to Pueblo after the county commissioners voted 3-0 to block a proposed energy park that would have contained a nuclear power plant.

Weeks ago Don Banner, a local lawyer, presented a proposal to build an energy park on 24,000 acres in Pueblo County between the towns of Avondale and Fowler.

After days of heated debates and residents weighing in on both sides of the issue the county commissioners made their final decision.

The commissioners voted unanimously to block the proposal and claimed a variety of reasons for their decision.

"It was a hard decision to make," Anthony Nunez, Commissioner, Chair Pro Tem, District 1 said. "I always kept in mind the water that it would take to cool these reactors down, that was paramount for me."

Nunez said agriculture is his number one priority and questioned what would happen to agriculture if Pueblo experienced a drought.

"When I looked at those two things (water and agriculture), it's what helped me to decide that I couldn't go with it at this time," Nunez said.

Jeff Chostner, Commissioner, District 3, said sometimes nuclear power is an appropriate action, but not at this place and not at this time.

Most who came out for the decision were happy with the commissioners' votes.

"We want Pueblo to grow, we want Pueblo to succeed, we want great jobs, we just don't want the federal subsidized nuclear power," Suzanne Morgan, President of Puebloans for Smart Energy and a Boone resident said.

But not everyone supported the decision to block the energy park.

"I respectfully disagree with their decision," Banner said. "But it's theirs to make and like the rest of us, we all have to live with our decisions, and they'll have to live with theirs."

Morgan said the proposed location would have put some residents in not one, but two, hazardous areas.

"There's a certain segment of the population that already lives in what they call the 'red zone' from the Pueblo Chemical Depot, and we're all notified, we get our little post cards in the mail, we have our town meetings and whatnot," Morgan said. "When this one goes in there's a certain amount of us that will not be in just one but two of these red zones, and so we're looking at our property values going down, we're looking at just living in a hazard of two of those areas."

The commissioners said they received thousands of letters and emails, both for and against the plant.

"They're as safe as can humanly be made safe," Banner said. "We send people in satellites to the moon and back and for the most part they do it safely, we can build nuclear power plants in this country safely."

Banner said southern Colorado missed out on a great economic opportunity.

"I think Southern Colorado's economy would have been greatly bolstered as a result of this, if we would have passed it and it would have come to fruition," he said.

Banner said he has been contacted by another community in Colorado that wants him to explore an energy park there, but he wouldn't say where that was and also added he wasn't sure if he even wanted to do it.