News SegmentsTue, 04/19/2011 - 13:12
Brad Kutner, FSRN,
Pittsylvania County, Virginia.
Almost 30 years ago, the state of Virginia banned uranium mining.
Environmentalists and local residents have long opposed uranium mining because of concerns about the impact of toxic and radioactive waste on water quality, public health and the environment. Now, corporate stakeholders want the ban repealed and are lobbying to exploit one of the 10 largest uranium deposits in the world. Brad Kutner has the story, which was funded by the community at Spot.us.
TRANSCRIPT: Located in south central Virginia, the rolling hills of Pittsylvania County cover nearly 1,000 square miles. Some of the county’s 62,000 residents have a long, rich history here including beef cattle rancher Phillip Lovelace.
“I’m ninth generation. My granddaughter is 11th generation. I live on the farm I was born on. My great ganddaddy lived across the ridge from where I’m at, about four tenths of a mile in a one-room cabin with a rock chimney and a loft - that’s where my grandpappy was raised.”
Lovelace is fiercely proud of this legacy. But now he and other Pittsylvania residents are fighting to protect their community from a proposed uranium mine planned for Coles Hill, a historic property owned by the same family since the 1780s. Seventh generation hay farmer Bryon Motley lives adjacent to the potential mine site.
“I can walk out on this farm: the old tobacco barn is over here, my fathers fingerprints is in the mud-darby between the logs, I can see them. I can go down behind the old home house, there’s a big beech tree down there, and my father and uncles initials are put in their from 1939, the inside of that tree. How do I walk away from this? You know? So I’ve got to take a stand. But if I’m forced out I don’t know where I’ll go, I really don’t.”
Motley, Lovelace and others took notice when the company started by the Coles family, Virginia Uranium, started buying up parcels of land. Another neighboring family, the Bowens, also have a stake in Virginia Uranium as well as a Canadian firm, Virginia Energy Resources. The company now owns about 3,000 acres and has been lobbying Virginia’s legislature to lift a decades-old ban on uranium mining.
Virginia Uranium values the site at up to $10 billion.
But some dispute the clean energy classification, pointing out that the uranium mining process creates greenhouse gas emissions. And when accidents happen at uranium mines, the consequences can be serious and long-term. The waste from mines, or tailings, is often the culprit. The most notorious of these disasters is the Church Rock tailings spill of 1979. Located on the Navajo Nation’s northern New Mexico territory, the spill poured 1,100 tons of radioactive waste and 90 million gallons of contaminated liquid into the Rio Puerco River.
These kinds of accidents, along with ground-water contamination and medical issues, such as cancer and birth defects, have caused Pittsylvania locals, like cattle rancher Lovelace, to rally against removing the ban.
“Those tailings being exposed to the environment, if we have a massive hurricane in the area which we live and we have a lot of them. Our water table is very shallow to the top of the ground, this area has fractured rock. Uranium is water-soluble, it will mix in our ground water. And you cannot get radiation out of your water. It cannot be removed. You can cut it, you can make it weaker, but you still have radiation.”
Lovelace’s concerns don’t stop with his own locality. He has seen the statewide maps showing uranium deposits that stretch from the North Carolina border across to the southern tip of Maryland.
“It’s not gonna be just right here in Pittsylvania county. They’re going to open this whole state up if that moratorium is lifted.”
That is where Naomi Hodge-Muse, president of the Martinsville NAACP, comes in. She lives about a half-hour from the proposed site, but also foresees the floodgates opening if the moratorium is lifted.
“I don’t care because it’s 30 miles away? That’s not an acceptable answer, not if you consider yourself a citizen of a state, and you love your state.”
Hodge-Muse, along with the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, organized bus trips across the state to attend public comment hearings about lifting the ban.
“Five different localities, all in agreement, all racially diverse. Because this is a Virginia issue, this is a citizen issue, this has no party line, no ethnicity. As a Virginian, you have a right to walk outside and breathe clean air.”
The public hearings were conducted by the National Academy of Sciences, an all-volunteer body which is reviewing studies submitted by different groups to understand the social, environmental and economic impact of lifting the ban.
One such study was paid for by the city of Virginia Beach to better understand the possibility of a heavy rainstorm on the bodies of water between Coles Hill and Virginia Beach, including the city’s water supply, Lake Gaston. Tom Leahy, director of public utilities for the city of Virginia Beach, said although the study deals with a worst-case scenario, such weather events are not uncommon.
“The hydrology in Virginia is well documented that the eastern ridge of the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains are particularly susceptible to extreme flooding events and events that are sometimes referred to PMP, or probable maximum precipitation storms. And these types of storms are capable of devastating virtually any man made structure.”
The Virginia Beach “Uranium Mining Impact Study” found that such a storm could result in significant accumulation of radioactive materials in the riverbed, flood plains and reservoir.
The results of that study have been challenged by Bob Bodnar, professor of geochemistry at Virginia Tech and a supporter of the mine. Bodnar, who has more than three decades of experience in geosciences, has conducted hydrological studies of the Coles Hill site funded by Virginia Uranium. He says the idea of ground water contamination from modern mining operations is often misunderstood.
“When you dig a hole in the ground, whether it’s an open pit or an underground mine, water does not flow from that area out into the surrounding areas to contaminate the ground or surface water, instead, water flows towards that hole.”
Water would be continuously pumped out of the mine, and purified on site by Virginia Uranium, according to Bodnar, who says changes in technology mean uranium can be mined responsibly.
“It would be treated and any harmful elements or dissolved components in the water would be removed and then the water would be returned, either to the ground water through a well or to surface springs, would meet all the drinking water standards of the EPA.“
But following Japan’s nuclear crisis, mine proponents might have a harder time convincing lawmakers to repeal the ban.
And some, including hay farmer Motley, see this as an opportunity for Virginia to become a true leader in energy independence by investing in wind, water and solar energy.
“We have a new school that our tobacco money helped build, the advanced Technology school in Danville. We’ve got several excellent schools in Virginia that we could be getting this into a feasible way of powering our country.
Our honorable governor and the honorable people we’ve elected into these seats,they need to realize nuclear is 50-years-old, it’s not new process. We’ve got to go to new process; we’ve got to find a better and cleaner way.”
The Virginia General Assembly has the final say on lifting the uranium-mining ban, and only meets at the beginning of every year for a few months.
Virginia Uranium’s attempts to lift the ban this past year were squashed, but they are taking steps to ensure the issue is discussed during the 2012 session. Members of the Virginia Energy and Mining Committee refused to discuss the issue until the National Academy of Sciences finishes their report, which is scheduled for completion at the end of this year.
Read more:
http://fsrn.org/audio/web-only-extended-version-pressure-mounts-repeal-virginias-30-year-ban-uranium-mining/8385
