HALIFAX COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS
"JUST SAYS NO"
(From The Gazette-Virginian 01-10-08)
Halifax County Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution supporting the continued moratorium on uranium mining during its regular monthly meeting Monday night in Halifax.Jack Dunavant, chairman of Southside Concerned Citizens, urged supervisors to support the resolution based on the potential negative health and environmental impacts and other serious problems associated with uranium mining.“I stand up here probably for the first time addressing an issue that I think we can all agree on. I don’t think there’s any division on this. We are threatened by a corporation that wants to destroy our way of life, and we’ve got to do something to stop it,” he said.He explained this issue will be fought on two fronts – locally and in Richmond, and he emphasized money will play a role in this fight as the price of uranium has increased from its low of $15 a pound to its current price of over $100 a pound.From an engineering standpoint, Dunavant outlined what Walter Coles plans to do on Coles Hill, near Chatham – location of what is believed to be the largest uranium deposit in America.The Coles Hill deposit includes two ore bodies and an estimated 110 million pounds of high-grade uranium worth at least $10 billion.The northern ore body is on Coles’ land; the southern ore body is on land owned by Coles and the Henry Bowen family.“Mr. Coles has yet to come forward with any new technology,” Dunavant said. “It’s still an open pit mine or a shaft type mine, and both of those create a tremendous mountain of waste.”According to the SCC Chairman, Coles has said he is leaning toward an open pit mine.“What they want to do is go in and blast it out and grind it up into a fine slurry of sand and extract as much uranium as they can. They get a half a pound of uranium out of a ton of rock. So everything else that comes out of that hole is going to be a mountain of waste. “And what happens to that waste when we get 44 inches of rain in a year?” he asked, explaining that one acre of land gets 1.3 million gallons of rain “dumped on it in a year, and they’re talking about hundreds of acres.” Halifax County residents should be concerned about this, he believes, because this mine lies in the Banister River watershed.“What washes off this mountain of material or flushes up out of the ground is coming down into the Banister to pollute and poison one of our major sources of water.”Furthermore, Dunavant said, “They want to scoop all this stuff up, treat it and process it at the site to produce a product called yellow cake.”Once the yellow cake is taken out of the ground, he said Coles wants to push the tailings back into the “big bowl” created during the open pit mining process.“It’s like a big bowl of cereal – 100 acres or whatever – and after a while it’s going to fill up. Where’s it going?” Dunavant asked board members. “We all know where it’s going. It’s going back into the creeks and the Banister River and then get down to Lake Gaston and on down to eastern North Carolina.”He warned there’s no way to stop this water pollution from rainfall.In addition, Dunavant said wind is another natural factor to consider.“While it’s piled up for the next 30 years, you’re going to have a mountain of material out there that you can’t push back in the hole because they’re mining it, and you’re going to get wind blowing. So you’re going to get radioactive waste from the tailings pile due to wind.”Uranium has a half-life of over a half million years, Dunavant said. “That means it loses half of its strength over 500,000 years. That’s pretty potent stuff,” he said, adding “radiation is forever. The radiation you get in your body today is added to what you’ve had all through your life. You never lose it, and if you get over a certain amount, it’s going to cause cancers and deaths, and that’s not a pretty sight.”In conclusion, he told supervisors that radiation from uranium is dependant on three things - the amount of time a person is exposed, the distance from the source and the strength of the source.“For the life of me, I can’t see how this is going to benefit Halifax County,” Dunavant told the supervisors as he asked the county leaders to protect their constituents by adopting the resolution supporting the continued moratorium.Election District - 7 Supervisor Lottie Nunn made the motion to adopt the following resolution which was passed unanimously by the six members present:WHEREAS, in the early 1980’s the potential for mining uranium in the Virginia counties of Pittsylvania and Orange was proposed whereby the Virginia Assembly issued a moratorium on the mining and milling of uranium until the industry could prove that it could perform such activities without hazardous impacts to the natural resources and public health of the Commonwealth; andWHEREAS, since that time, uranium mining in the United States and throughout the world has resulted in a host of serious problems, including toxic and radioactive contamination of groundwater and surface water in addition to the risk of cancer and other health problems for workers and the public; andWHEREAS, the recent increase of energy prices has promoted the reemergence of interest in the uranium mining and milling industry as proposed by Virginia Uranium, Inc., at the Coles Hill Deposit near Pittsylvania County community of Sheva located within the Banister River Watershed approximately 20 miles upriver from the Town of Halifax; andWHEREAS, the Banister River Reservoir currently serves as the source of drinking water for the Town of Halifax and is recognized as part of its strategic regional water supply by the Halifax County Service Authority; andWHEREAS, there is no precedent of a large-scale uranium mine in a wet climate such as the Virginia Piedmont where annual precipitation exceeds evaporation causing uranium tailings ponds to overflow as well as to leach into the water table; andWHEREAS, the economic benefits of a uranium mine remain uncertain with potential negative impacts caused by pollution, public health problems, and decreased productive farmland.THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, the Halifax County Board of Supervisors hereby supports the continued moratorium on the mining and milling of uranium within the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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