2011.11.27
Rupert Cutler is anything but a wild-eyed radical. The Michigan native holds a doctorate in resource development. He’s a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and has spent much of his career in the field of wildlife management.
He came to Roanoke in 1991 to direct Explore Park.
Cutler is also a longtime member of the Roanoke Kiwanis Club. Around here, that’s pretty much a badge of moderation and civic responsibility. There’s not a single crazy hippie in the whole bunch.
He showed up at the Roanoke City Council on Monday and raised some concerns about a project certain folks in Pittsylvania County are eager to get under way. It’s a uranium mine north of Chatham called Coles Hill, where there’s an estimated 119 million pounds of the stuff.
Virginia uranium mining has been prohibited since 1982 by action of the General Assembly. But Virginia Uranium Inc. and its associated companies (some of which already have been shut down in parts of Canada) are eager to get that moratorium lifted.
In the past three years, Virginia Uranium has further educated state lawmakers with more than $151,000 in campaign contributions, two-thirds of which went to Republicans.
At Monday’s meeting Cutler spoke in support of a city council resolution urging the General Assembly to keep the uranium mining moratorium in place.
The council ended up passing a watered-down version that urges the state to keep the ban in place but only for 2012.
His presentation raised some interesting points. Some of them I’m summarizing here.
1. After all the uranium at Coles Hill is mined and milled, 29 million tons of radioactive tailings would remain at the site, which is about 50 miles from Roanoke and 12 miles from Smith Mountain Lake.
A number like that is so big it’s hard to wrap your head around. So let’s think about it in different terms. For each man, woman and child in the Roanoke Valley (there are about 300,000), the Coles Hill project would leave 193,000 pounds of uranium-mine tailings.
Cutler quoted John Cairns, a retired professor of biology at Virginia Tech regarding this:
“Huge tailings piles are a big problem and lead to contamination of both ground and surface water. High winds can transport fine particles from tailings long distances. Uranium mining is not safe where it rains a lot.”
2. Those tailings would be in the Roanoke River basin, which drains into Lake Gaston, which supplies water to Virginia Beach and to large military bases in the Norfolk area.
Cutler quoted Robert Moran, a Colorado hydrologist who visited Roanoke earlier this month, at the invitation of the Roanoke River Basin Association.
“Uranium mines cannot be managed to be absolutely clean. Radioactivity will escape into the environment. There is no safe level of radioactivity in drinking water. Any level will cause cancer. There has never been a uranium mine waste tailings disposal site that did not leak.”
3. Dust from the sand-like tailings would contain, among other things, radium and arsenic. It could easily be blown into Smith Mountain Lake, which Bedford County is eying as a future source of drinking water. Conceivably, such dust could reach Roanoke.
“On the specific question of radon and dust from a Coles Hill mining operation and tailings dump reaching Roanoke, a technical report published by the U.S. EPA states that the health of populations living at a distance greater than 50 miles might be affected,” Cutler said. “Roanoke is within the radius of the potential radioactive dust impact.”
4. There are at least three former U.S. uranium mining sites that have been so badly poisoned that they’re now being remediated by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund. Cutler suggested that, after all the ore has been extracted from Coles Hill, the mining operators would vamoose.
“U.S. taxpayers – including you and me and our descendants – would be stuck with taking care of this poisonous waste forever. That is called ‘privatized profits and socialized costs,’” he said.
Read more:
http://blogs.roanoke.com/dancasey/2011/11/sundays-column-who-do-you-believe-on-uranium-mining/comment-page-1/#comment-147989
