By Rose Ellen O'Connor, on November 29th, 2011
Natural Resources News Service
Virginia Uranium displays photos of Bessines, France, on its website. One shows rolling hills and lush forests running from an area that used to be a mine site, and a caption hails the “safe mining of Bessines.” Virginia Uranium executives say they wanted their guests to see how careful mining can leave the land intact. But mining in the Limousin area of France, which includes the small hamlet of Bessines, landed Cogema, then a huge French mining company, in criminal court.
Virginia Uranium executives say that Bessines has no environmental problems after 50 years of mining. Pittsylvania County, company executives say, is very similar to Bessines. The areas have similar temperatures and rainfall, and they even share the same primary agriculture products: dairy and beef cattle. Bessines is more heavily populated, the company says. The French hamlet has 171 people per square mile and Pittsylvania County has 64.
There is a starker difference, however, between the two sites. Bessines is not subject to the brutal weather that pummels Virginia. Between 1950 and 2006, more than 370 tornadoes and 29 hurricanes have struck Virginia, according to the state Department of Emergency Management. Another 29 nor’easters, intense winter storms that the department says are sometimes “explosive,” have hit the state.
Virginia Uranium showed legislators a lovely lake near Bessines and arranged for them to meet local residents and officials. Lawmakers say the mayor told them she thought uranium mining had been good for the area and some local residents, whose relatives had worked in the mine, said they would like to have the industry back.
"Bessines, in France’s Limousin region, is a former uranium extraction site. Having ceased operations, it underwent an amazing rehabilitation through a quality initiative." Areva
Del. Plum, who visited Bessines without Virginia Uranium, says he wanted to avoid a “staged presentation.” Plum says he was struck by a lake in the area that surrounds the closed mine. It was fenced in and access was limited, he says. A guide told him that pieces of old mining equipment are stored at the bottom of lakes in Bessines.
“When the mine is closed up, that’s the way they dispose of the mining equipment. That’s my understanding from visiting there,” Plum says. “What it said to me is that uranium mining is not a one-time or a one-year or a couple-year concern. It’s a concern for decades and maybe centuries.”
In 1994, Cogema was shutting down its operations in Limousin. It had run 40 mines and two mills in the area for decades and the mines had been exhausted. The company would later merge and become Areva, a state-owned multinational conglomerate that is the world’s largest nuclear power company.
Local authorities asked for an assessment of the environmental impact of Coegma’s mining and milling on Limousin. They hired the Commission for Independent Research and Information about Radiation, a French anti-nuclear research group formed in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The group’s scientific laboratories are certified by France’s health minister.
The commission found that Cogema had failed to monitor the radioactive contamination of soils, rivers and air adequately. Radon, a carcinogen and byproduct of uranium, was in the air in public spaces at 30 times the normal level, the commission found. The study found that radioactive rocks and deposits were dumped into rivers and streams, and that river sediments and aquatic plants downstream of the mines were “seriously contaminated.”
The commission also found that 6 million tons of waste had been dumped into an open-pit mine near Bessines and another 8 million piled on slopes. The radioactivity in the area was 70 times that allowed in the most dangerous nuclear installations, according to the review.
It accused Cogema of “pollution, abandonment and dumping.”
In August 2002, a court magistrate in the Limoges Court brought a criminal case, although a public prosecutor fought to have it thrown out. In a case of numerous twist and turns, an appeals court ruled in March 2004 that the case could stand, issuing a 20-page ruling that found Cogema “did not adequately manage radioactive material” and used “only rudimentary techniques to prevent the dispersal of radioactive substances into the environment.” The court called the company’s actions “deliberate” because “it ignored reports of environmental pollution.”
Read more at:
http://www.dcbureau.org/201111296597/natural-resources-news-service/uranium-mining-%e2%80%93-the-virginia-battleground-%e2%80%93-environmental-concerns-vs-corporate-interests-part-three.html
