'If I represent the wishes of a majority of people in my district, I must side with those who favor a study of this issue,' Merricks told the committee."
RICHMOND - The proposal to study mining of Pittsylvania County’s huge uranium deposit died Monday in the House Rules committee when Southside Virginia delegates said no, with backing from House leaders.
Del. Watkins Abbitt, I-Appomattox, made the motion to table the bill. It passed overwhelmingly on what was officially recorded as a voice vote. Only four of the House Rules committee’s 15 members voted to have the study done by the National Academy of Sciences.
People on both sides of the mining-safety debate agreed after the hearing that the issue is likely to come back to the General Assembly next year.
“We’re going to keep working and trying to move forward,” said Walter Coles, founder of Virginia Uranium Inc., which had sought the mining study.
“Obviously this issue isn’t going to go away,” said Kay Slaughter of the Southern Environmental Law Center, which had negotiated several changes to the bill before it won approval in the Senate. She said delegates’ comments during the hearing indicated many of them wanted a careful study.
The study’s bill had been steered gingerly through the Senate by its sponsor, Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach, who had accepted a series of amendments proposed by environmentalists and a Southside citizens group. Only two senators opposed the bill during several votes on that side of the General Assembly.
But in the House Rules Committee, which had postponed its hearing three times, details of behind-the-scenes negotiations emerged in the hour-long hearing.
Abbitt, Del. Clarke Hogan, R-South Boston, and other committee members from Southside proposed their own version of the bill. In essence, they urged that a study be done of whether to conduct the mining study.
Coles called that move “a delaying tactic.”
Abbitt and Hogan gained support from House Majority Leader Del. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem.
“I do think we ought to study it,” Griffith said. “I just don’t think something that can affect the climate and quality of life for 2,000 years has to be done immediately,” Griffith said.
Two of the Rules Committee’s ranking members, House Speaker Del. William Howell, R-Spotsylvania, and Del. Lacey Putney, I-Bedford, joined in voting against the bill.
Abbitt, who doesn’t speak out often in the assembly, left no doubt about his position on the uranium study.
Abbitt said he was a member of a House study panel 25 years ago that looked into whether the Pittsylvania deposit, one of the largest in the United States, could be mined safely. The committee concluded safe mining was possible, but a drop in uranium prices after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident ended the 1980s proposal.
“I was on the study 25 years ago in which we laid out what you need to do to mine uranium in this state, and that seems to be ignored,” Abbitt said.
“So, why are we going to the National Academy of Sciences” to conduct another study, Abbitt asked.
Tim Hayes, a Richmond lobbyist for Virginia Uranium Inc., which proposed the study and offered to pay for it, said the 1985 study isn’t being ignored.
Hayes said the company wants to study whether there have been any advances in uranium mining that would change the safety of how mining waste, called tailings, are handled.
“Tailings were the key part 25 years ago,” Abbitt replied, “and you had to keep any moisture from getting to the tailings for 1,000 years.
“I’ve talked to the engineers for this company,” Abbitt said, “and I can save you some time, because the engineers who met with me said the only thing that has improved is they’ve got a little bit better quality of liner” to use in pits where radioactive waste would be stored after mining. The liner is intended to keep radiation from leaching into ground water and, eventually, streams.
Also, Abbitt said, engineers told him they had learned more about how to compact the waste to prevent some water absorption.
Del. Donald Merricks, R-Chatham, said the Pittsylvania deposit is in his district and “naturally this issue is very close to home for me.” The district’s economy has suffered in the past 10 years from losing jobs in tobacco, textiles and furniture factories.
Merricks said he couldn’t vote for mining to be done immediately, but three-fourths of the e-mails he received from people in his district supported the study.
“If I represent the wishes of a majority of people in my district, I must side with those who favor a study of this issue,” Merricks told the committee.
Griffith concluded his statement with, “Clearly I think there are going to be more conversations about this in the next year.”
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