Thursday, December 13, 2012

End Run: Supporters of Uranium Mining in Virginia Push Bill to Effectively Lift the Ban Without an Up or Down Vote

 

Chatham, VA

The company that wants to mine uranium in Virginia is supporting a bill in the upcoming General Assembly calling for regulations to govern the proposed mining, according to lobbyists for Virginia Uranium. The move is widely seen by environmentalists and others as a way to authorize the mining while avoiding an up or down vote on the controversial project.

If approved, it would be the first full-scale uranium mining project east of the Mississippi. Mining in the U.S. has traditionally taken place in arid areas of the West, and opponents of the mine say south central Virginia’s relatively wet climate and susceptibility to hurricanes, storms and even earthquakes increases the health and safety risks of uranium mining in the state.

The Coles Hill deposit in Pittsylvania County has 119 million pounds of uranium

Legislators placed a moratorium on uranium mining in the early 1980s after the now-defunct Canadian firm, Marline Uranium Corp., lobbied for permission to mine the Coles Hill deposit. Marline dropped its request after the market for uranium tanked in the mid 1980s.

The moratorium still stands and the law states that it will not be lifted “until a program for permitting uranium mining is established by statute.”

Whitt Clement
Whitt Clement, head of the state government relations team at Hunton & Williams and one of 19 lobbyists employed by Virginia Uranium, told a closed-door meeting of Virginia business leaders in Williamsburg last month that the company is working on legislation that would authorize state agencies to draft regulations to govern mining rather than voting directly on the project, two of the businessmen present say.

Robert Burnley
“It’s a de facto lifting of the ban,” Robert Burnley, president of Strategic Environmental Advice in Richmond, a consulting firm working with mine opponents, and former director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, says. “Once the regulations are in place, the mining can commence.”

Ben Davenport, owner of First Piedmont Corp., a waste removal company in Chatham, Virginia, also attended the meeting of the board of directors of the state’s Chamber of Commerce. Chatham, surrounded by bucolic farmland and rolling hills and streams, is about six miles from the Coles Hill site.

However, Ben Davenport of the Alliance for Progress in Southern Virginia says just the possibility of a uranium mine has hurt the local economy, making it tougher to sell property near the proposed mine or attract newcomers to the area.

“We feel like a uranium mine would be a detriment to our economy,” Davenport said. “There’s a stigma and a perception that hurts our ability to attract businesses to locate here and people to move here.”

Read all the report click here:
http://www.dcbureau.org/201211198092/natural-resources-news-service/end-run-supporters-of-uranium-mining-in-virginia-push-bill-to-effectively-lift-the-ban-without-an-up-or-down-vote.html#more-8092
By , on November 19th, 2012