It depends on who you ask. There are many players involved in Virginia Uranium’s proposal to mine a deposit in Pittsylvania County said to be worth 10 billion dollars. It has been a polarizing issue and there is truth on all sides. The real question is who has the largest quantity of fact and how will that weigh in the General Assembly’s decision on lifting the moratorium on uranium mining in the state that has been in place for decades?
First of all, there are the economically challenged residents of the area. All of Southside has taken a hard hit with the evaporation of textiles and furniture factories then came the recession. To think that they are sitting on billions of dollars of minerals can be nothing but tempting.
Virginia Uranium, Inc. is the force behind getting this done for obvious and understandable reasons: the profits might be enormous. It could be an economic boon for the entire state so the General Assembly is very interested in it, too.
That the uranium is there seems to be well established which brings up a host of questions to which one can receive widely disparate answers. How many jobs will it create? How long will the mine be operational? What happens when it closes? Who has final safety oversight of the project? What does the National Academy of Science report really say? What is the future of uranium as a source of electric power production in this country, in the world? What happens to the radioactivity in the tailings . . . the leftovers from the milling? Where will the tailings (29 million tons, by estimate) be stored? How sure can we be the generous and shallow water table that supplies much of Virginia Beach via Lake Gaston won’t be contaminated? What about Leesville Lake that pumps into Smith Mountain Lake? Who stands to make money from the mining? Are the environmentalists making up facts as a Virginia Uranium spokesman loudly proclaims? Can the General Assembly votes be . . . perish the thought . . . influenced by lobbyists?
There are opposing answers to every one of these questions and those are only the most obvious ones. Last Friday WVTF (89.1) broadcast on “Virginia Conversations” a discussion about the issues. It can be accessed at virginapublicradio.org and it’s worth a listen. If nothing else it gives a picture of how far apart the two sides are. Try to tune out the name-calling to which one of the discussants descends. Listen carefully to a couple of the callers who really understand what is at stake. Ignore those who suggest if we can go to the moon we can solve any problem!
Here are a few facts not mentioned on the program. Right after World War II uranium mining was the “gold rush of the 20th century.” If you found a deposit, you bought the land or staked a “claim” with the Bureau of Land and Mines then with virtually no regulation or oversight, you could start mining and selling. In the midcentury there were over a thousand such mines in this country, almost entirely in the west. Today, there is only one active mine in the United States; it is in northern Arizona but a number are going through the permitting process. If it works in Virginia, there could be others in our area.
There are many reasons the mines shut down, but a major one was no one understood the dangers of involved in the residue. Many mines were simply abandoned. If you want an example of what happened, check out Grand Junction, CO and uranium mining. No wonder they call it “the glowing town.”
Today, things are vastly different. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and many other agencies oversee all nuclear energy production and related activity. One may recall that there has been great controversy over where to store the spent fuel rods (they are more dangerous than the nuclear reactors). Yucca Mountain, NV seemed a good place, but the good people of Nevada weren’t too excited about it, so it continues to be an issue. The radioactivity of the tailings lasts from thousands of years to perhaps billions. To say they will be safe for 200 hundred years misses the point entirely.
Many countries are looking at the possibility of ceasing all nuclear power plants, Germany and Japan, in particular. We haven’t opened a new nuclear power plant in decades. The names of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are disasters that no will ever forget.
There is much more to say, but this is an issue on which every thinking person in the East must become informed. To leave it to those who hope to recognize a huge and immediate profit would be a dereliction of duty to our descendants for millennia to come.