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Move over, Albuquerque, Los Alamos and Carlsbad. There's another nuclear city in the Land of Enchantment.

The nuclear age is rebounding in southeastern New Mexico, where tiny Eunice is looking like an old West boomtown.

But it's not what's in the ground around town that's primarily driving the local economic engine - though Eunice is surrounded by oil and gas wells that are thriving with the currently rising global gasoline and natural gas prices. Rather, it is being driven by the demand - expected to boom soon, too - for nuclear energy and the uranium fuel that generates it.

Eunice, population 2,700, is expected to grow by about 1,000 people in the next year or two - workers needed to build and operate the Louisiana Energy Services' $1.5 billion uranium enrichment plant there that recently was approved by state and federal regulators. To accommodate that rush, the city expects it'll need at least 400 new houses and dozens of new apartments.

Eunice, which does not have a traffic light, also is preparing to spend millions of dollars on new water lines, a new sewage treatment plant, a new public swimming pool and a downtown beautification project - with some of the financing coming from contributions from the town's new corporate citizen, LES.

Anti-nuclear critics say its a fool's bargain, but Eunice and southeastern New Mexico are betting on a future in which nuclear energy is in demand, uranium enrichment is a growth industry and some of the associated profits will flow into Eunice.

It's a safe bet.

Regardless of whether you like nuclear power, there is an inescapable reality that it is bound to grow as the United States and the world move from coal-fired power plants to reduce the impact of carbon emissions on global warming. Some proposals for stemming the threat of global warming include a ban on the construction of coal-fired power plant. If not coal, what?

While alternative and renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, can help, they are a long way from being able to provide the volume of energy or the consistency of production that today's modern electrical grid demands. Nuclear power is the only option currently on the table that can deliver on the same scale and reliability that coal has done for more than a century.

But, like coal and global warming, nuclear energy is not risk-free, and the country and its political leaders must resolve the growing problem of safely handling and disposing of nuclear wastes, as well as the compelling need for a safer nuclear power-plant design.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, New Mexico has no nuclear power plant itself, but it continues a half-century history of being the state most closely identified with the nuclear age. The first atomic bomb was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory and tested at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo. Los Alamos and its sibling, Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, remain two of the nation's top nuclear weapon research labs.

Albuquerque, sometimes known as Atomic City, is the hub for transporting nuclear weapons to and from U.S. armed forces around the world. And it hosts one of the nation's prime nuclear weapons depots on Kirtland Air Force Base. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad was the first repository in the United States for nuclear wastes - WIPP specifically handling plutonium wastes from the research and production of nuclear warheads.

And now uranium enrichment, to power nuclear power plants around the county and world, will be done in tiny Eunice.

If New Mexico officials ever decide to add to that list of officially adopted state characteristics - road runner, yucca, chile - New Mexico is nuclear.