Radiation from Tailings Will Escape Site-Dunavant

(From Media General News Service 01/29/2008)

Uranium study plan revised
By RAY REED
Media General News Service
Tuesday, January 29, 2008

RICHMOND - A revised plan for studying whether uranium can be mined safely in Virginia surfaced in the General Assembly Monday, driven by an environmental group’s warning that the search for an answer should start with an unbiased review by scientists.
A Senate committee sent the new proposal from Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach, to a special subcommittee for a closer look. Most legislators and speakers saw it for the first time Monday morning.
Three people spoke in favor of the study and 11 opposed it during the hearing before the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources. The study would focus on a huge uranium deposit, worth up to $10 billion, in Pittsylvania County.
Among the supporters was Coy Harville, chairman of the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors. Several audience members opposed the bill, with more than a dozen of them from Pittsylvania and Halifax counties wearing green-and-yellow caps of Southside Concerned Citizens.
The revised bill from Wagner seemed to put the National Academy of Sciences near the forefront, and ahead of legislators and business interests, in analyzing new mining methods and how they might apply to the Pittsylvania County site about six miles north of Chatham.
Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, was the first committee member to question Wagner. Deeds said he was an attorney in Danville in 1984 when an uproar about the Pittsylvania County deposit led to a statewide ban on uranium mining that is still in effect.
“What has changed about the ground or science to make us believe the result will be different this time?” Deeds asked.
Wagner replied, “We have made leaps and bounds in environmental science.” No one knows if those advances will make mining safe, he said, “but that’s why we want to have a study.”
“We’re not saying, ‘do it,’” Wagner said of mining. “We’re saying, ‘let’s look at the state of the art.’”
Virginia Uranium Inc., which is proposing the study and says it will pay for it, has said the likely method of mining would be an open pit where ore would be extracted and the milled dirt, or tailings, returned to the hole.
Jack Dunavant, chairman of Southside Concerned Citizens and owner of an earth-moving business, told the senators that if open-pit mining begins, “there is no way to confine radiation from the tailings pile to the site.”
Wind and water erosion will carry material into the Banister River where it can travel downstream to Albemarle Sound in North Carolina and affect Virginia Beach’s water supply along the way, Dunavant and other opponents said.
The tailings pile from a pit 600 feet deep would stretch 14 miles, Dunavant said.
The Wagner bill’s new assurance regarding the National Academy of Sciences wasn’t strong enough, said Cale Jaffe, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville.
Jaffe said he had talked with Wagner about the SELC’s problems with the original bill, which made the National Academy study an optional choice by a study commission composed of legislators and gubernatorial appointees.
“Our core concern is still not addressed,” Jaffe said, because Wagner’s new bill would allow the National Academy “or other entity” to conduct the research. Jaffe urged that the legislation specify that the National Academy do the study, and if it could not perform the work, the Legislature could then look for other experts.
The National Academy issue will be among the points the subcommittee will examine. Sen. Roscoe Reynolds, D-Henry County, was appointed head of the subcommittee. Its other members are Sen. Frank Ruff, R-Clarksville; Sen. John C. Watkins, R-Midlothian; Sen. J. Chapman Petersen, D-Fairfax; and Sen. Ryan McDougle, R-Mechanicsville.
Ray Reed is a staff writer for The News & Advance in Lynchburg