Oregon lawmakers and some other elected officials are awfully concerned about carbon emissions and the deleterious effects of climate change.

On the vital matter of solutions, however, officials have a troubling lack of vision.

And one blind spot is particularly problematic —

nuclear power.

This safe and reliable source of green electricity has been restricted in Oregon since 1980, a casualty of the reaction — overreaction, as it turns out — to the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.

Even though no one died in that accident, the worst in the history of commercial nuclear power in the U.S., it spawned an irrational fear of fission. Among the byproducts was a moratorium that Oregon voters approved, with 53% in favor, banning new nuclear power plants without voter approval. Six years later voters also decided to prohibit such plants until the federal government picked a repository site for nuclear waste.

(A decision that has yet to be made.)

The 1980 and 1986 voter-approved measures didn’t affect Oregon’s lone nuclear plant, Trojan, which Portland General Electric opened in 1975 near Rainier, along the Columbia River northwest of Portland. PGE closed Trojan in 1993.

Since then, thousands of wind turbines have been erected in Oregon, including in Northeastern Oregon. The state also has many solar farms.

Those new sources, added to Oregon’s abundant hydropower, have helped to replace the relatively dirty energy produced by the state’s last coal-fired power plant, which shut down in 2020 near Boardman.

But politically popular power sources such as wind and solar can’t compete, for sheer production, consistency and reliability, with nuclear power.

Yet Oregon officials have continued to ignore nuclear power even as they demand that the state’s major electric providers, PGE and Pacific Power, cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80% below baseline levels by 2030, by 90% by 2035 and by 100% by 2040.

The Democrat-controlled Legislature passed a bill imposing those requirements in 2021, and then-Gov. Kate Brown signed it into law.

What’s not clear is how the two utilities will meet those ambitious goals — and particularly whether they can do so without nuclear power.

In California, where the state’s only nuclear power plant could close in 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom has advocated for operating the plant beyond that year to reduce the risk of a recurrence of California’s rolling blackouts in August 2020. The plant, along the central California coast, generates about 9% of the electricity for the nation’s most populous state.

But with the uncertainty about nuclear power in California beyond 2025, earlier this month a state board decided to allow three natural gas-fired power plants — cleaner than coal-fired plants but with larger carbon footprints than nuclear — to operate through 2026.

In Ontario, Canada, which removed coal from its power sources in 2014, the province generates more than two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear plants.

Yet even with compelling evidence that Oregon might struggle to reach its emissions goals without nuclear power, lawmakers have declined even to ask voters to reconsider the nuclear bans dating to 1980 and 1986. There were two bills to put the matter on the ballot, and neither had a hearing in Salem.

Embracing nuclear power, or at least acknowledging its potential role in curbing carbon emissions, is hardly a fringe belief.

The Biden administration in 2022 committed $6 billion to keep open existing nuclear plants, citing their importance of nuclear power in meeting emissions goals.

Oregon lawmakers’ failure to give voters a chance to express themselves is both inexplicable and indefensible.