Posted: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 9:34 am
When I joined the members of the Alliance for Progress for Southern Virginia in calling on the General Assembly in January to study uranium mining and milling further before considering lifting the ban, my plea was grounded in lessons learned from the past – lessons learned the hard way.
Everything we did at the First Piedmont Rock Quarry site was in compliance with the local, state and federal regulations of the early 1970s.
What happened was that the science caught up with the practice, and all around the country people realized the practice was harming the environment.
In 1979, the EPA proposed the creation of a Superfund to clean up potentially harmful sites. At that time, it estimated there were between 32,000 and 50,000 sites in the United States.
People over the age of 45 likely remember dumping whatever trash they could not burn in a metal drum somewhere on their family farm or at a community dumping area, not to mention the thousands of un-lined municipal landfills that existed at that time.
North Carolina has identified over 677 old landfill sites alone.
People did not dump at these sites under the cover of night; they were created and used with the blessing of local authorities.
But, in the late 1970s, environmental science showed that there was in fact an environmental impact.
The EPA signed off on each stage of the clean-up process at the Rock Quarry site.
Throughout the process, we have been in compliance and no fines have been levied against us.
However, over 20 years later, the regulations are still evolving as new research becomes available.
The current study by the EPA of the zinc levels at the site is a perfect example.
EPA continues to study the data and, when they decide on a course of action, we will respond as we have always done, in compliance with their directives.
My point is that environmental scientists learn new things every day about how human activities impact our environment.
What was deemed safe even five years ago may not be considered so today.
That’s why it is critical that we take a very cautious approach to uranium mining and milling in Virginia.
Cleaning up waste from factories is possible, but how are you going to do that with radioactive tailings?
Ben Davenport Jr. is chairman of First Piedmont Corp., a waste disposal company in Chatham.
Read more:
http://www.wpcva.com/opinion/article_917af818-735a-11e1-9743-0019bb2963f4.html
Everything we did at the First Piedmont Rock Quarry site was in compliance with the local, state and federal regulations of the early 1970s.
In 1979, the EPA proposed the creation of a Superfund to clean up potentially harmful sites. At that time, it estimated there were between 32,000 and 50,000 sites in the United States.
People over the age of 45 likely remember dumping whatever trash they could not burn in a metal drum somewhere on their family farm or at a community dumping area, not to mention the thousands of un-lined municipal landfills that existed at that time.
North Carolina has identified over 677 old landfill sites alone.
People did not dump at these sites under the cover of night; they were created and used with the blessing of local authorities.
But, in the late 1970s, environmental science showed that there was in fact an environmental impact.
The EPA signed off on each stage of the clean-up process at the Rock Quarry site.
Throughout the process, we have been in compliance and no fines have been levied against us.
However, over 20 years later, the regulations are still evolving as new research becomes available.
The current study by the EPA of the zinc levels at the site is a perfect example.
EPA continues to study the data and, when they decide on a course of action, we will respond as we have always done, in compliance with their directives.
My point is that environmental scientists learn new things every day about how human activities impact our environment.
What was deemed safe even five years ago may not be considered so today.
That’s why it is critical that we take a very cautious approach to uranium mining and milling in Virginia.
Cleaning up waste from factories is possible, but how are you going to do that with radioactive tailings?
Ben Davenport Jr. is chairman of First Piedmont Corp., a waste disposal company in Chatham.
Read more:
http://www.wpcva.com/opinion/article_917af818-735a-11e1-9743-0019bb2963f4.html
