Posted: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 2:17 pm
To the editor,
A well-known philosopher once said, "Explanations are for the mental masses."
This is what came to mind when I read Virginia Uranium Inc.'s most recent propaganda release, "We're committed to protecting water quality."
Why does VUI feel the need to continue to explain itself if in fact uranium mining would be as safe and innocuous as they claim? If uranium mining had ever been safe anywhere, which it has not, they wouldn't feel such a desperate need to explain just how safe their mine would be.
What they have presented is a pretty drawing of a disaster waiting to happen. A containment cell constructed just like your local landfill, only instead of household garbage, it contains radioactive waste. A nice concept, but one whose reliability over the course of 1,000 years is indeed doubtful.
The truly frightening part is the sentence that reads, " Covering tailings material with water during operations ..." Where do they imagine all that water will end up? It's water containing not only radioactive material, but a host of other toxins as well? And how do they know for certain that an earthquake could not crack that containment cell open like an egg or that a hurricane would not dump enough water on Coles Hill to cause those cells to become so saturated that they leak their contents into the groundwater surrounding them?
The truth is that VUI has no real idea how these cells will perform over time. No amount of regulations would prevent such naturally occurring catastrophes. VUI is putting its faith in an unknown, and they expect the rest of us here in Southside to do the same.
Like the builders of the Titanic, VUI wants to take us for a ride on their unsinkable ship. And we all know how many of those have ever been built. None. Zero. That's the same as the number of safe uranium mines that have ever been.
VUI can show us all the cute diagrams they want, but they can never truthfully say what will happen over the course of the next thousand years or even the next five minutes. The risks posed by uranium mining in Southside far outweigh whatever fleeting benefits it might present. VUI's cheerleading ads are no consolation to those of us who stand to lose everything and gain nothing from uranium.
Jesse Andrews
Halifax, VA
http://www.wpcva.com/altavista/opinion/article_815a9076-4789-11e1-bfe2-001871e3ce6c.html
