Lynchburg News & Advance
On Monday afternoon in a committee hearing room in the state Capitol, science took a right hook to the chin.
Beneath the soil of Pittsylvania County, near the county seat of Chatham, lies perhaps the largest uranium deposit in the continental United States. Virginia Uranium, a company founded by property owner Walter Coles, wants to extract the ore, worth an estimated $10 billion. Standing in its way, however, is a 24-year-old moratorium on uranium mining enacted by the General Assembly in 1983.
Virginia Uranium and its allies in the Assembly proposed a study, as a first step, to examine the question of whether mining could be done safely using today’s modern techniques. Fears about the safety of mining 25 years ago were the basis for the moratorium, but in the intervening decades, mining technology has undergone a revolution, begging the question of whether it could now be done safely.
That was the sole intent of SB 525, legislation introduced by Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach. As amended in the Senate, a blue-ribbon panel of experts and stakeholders, appointed by the governor and General Assembly, would be directed to contract with an organization along the lines of the National Academy of Sciences to conduct the safety and feasibility study.
In the Senate, Wagner accepted a number of changes to his original legislation proposed by environmentalists and Southside Concerned Citizens, an environmental group based in Halifax County. (Halifax, by the way, is downstream from the uranium site, sparking fears on the part of some folks about groundwater contamination by leachate from trailings, the leftover material from the mining process.)
But apparently it still wasn’t enough for the folks opposed even to a study of mining.
Dels. Watkins Abbitt, I-Appomattox, and Clarke Hogan, R-Halifax, proposed amending Wagner’s bill to simply call for a study of whether to conduct a study at all. When Wagner objected, the House panel decided to hold the bill over until the 2009 session. Del. Lacey Putney, I-Bedford, joined Abbitt in voting to hold the bill over.
Nationally and globally, energy demand is on the rise. Just look at the price of a gallon of gas, the cost of a barrel of crude oil or how much your last electric bill was. Most energy experts are slowly coming to the opinion that the world’s production of oil, the life blood of the global economy, has peaked and is on a downward trend, just as demand is taking off in the opposite direction.
The bottom line is that alternative sources of energy need to be developed. The United States currently gets about a fifth of its energy needs from nuclear power; in Europe, that percentage is much greater. Climate change, which experts believe has been speeded up by use of fossil fuels, gives added impetus to need to develop sources of power.
Even Al Gore, the leading global warming activist, believes nuclear power has a role to play in this nation’s future.
But apparently, fears based upon possibly outdated science and that old “Not in my backyard” syndrome have trumped science and concerns for America’s energy independence.
The question of whether to study mining’s safety is all but dead for this session of the Assembly, but it will come back in 2009.
Perhaps by then more rational heads will have prevailed.
3 comments:
The only thing sour about those grapes is that the pleas of the reasonable majority were silenced by the irrational hollering and outdated information of the minority.
In the interest of clarity, we feel it is important to identify the self-profile of "varockstar2008". Below is her own self-described profile:
varockstar2008
Gender: Female
Occupation: Writer, student, parent
Location: Danville : Virginia : United States
About Me
I am a native of Danville, Virginia. My family has been in Henry County, Pittsylvania County, and Danville City in one way or another for more than 200 years. I am a graduate of the George Washington High School and the University of Virginia, and I have moved back to Danville to take part in its rebuilding. I believe that we have been in a haze of ignorance and regret for too long, and now it is time to look toward our future. We are all reeling from the loss of textiles and tobacco, but we need to mourn their loss and get over it, because wallowing will get us nowhere. We need to look ahead to bigger things, and, in doing so, we will salvage our region.
Never mind the turtle. Don't you think you're sure to win?
Absolutely!
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Uranium mining in Virginia: We must support a study Walter Coles, Sr.
I live in a state with a nuclear diffusion and storage facility. It's been a 50 yr nightmare that started with the promise that things were safe and that the workers were helping in the Cold War effort. Then, in the 90's, all hell broke loose when worker after worker became desperately ill. Contamination is wide-spread. Lawsuits abound and will continue for years.
I also have lived in South Carolina where the Savannah River plant near Barnwell has caused a nightmare as well. Again, the gov't was full of promises. There were built-in safeguards. The EPA was going to do all sorts of monitoring. It didn't happen. The area is, for all intents and purposes, ruined for a half-million years.
I've read volumes of info, some of it provided by SCC, some of it provided by your blog, and some of it researched on my own. The story is always the same...the gov't walked out when the companies walked out and there are terminally ill people of all ages whose illnesses can be traced back to uranium, radon, etc. Water and land are forever contaminated. I have seen nothing that indicates that there is a safe way to mine uranium, period. I've particularly not seen anything that advises mining uranium in an area with the environmental conditions of Southside.
I've not seen anything that seemed like 'irrational hollering' from the mining opposition. I've not seen outdated info. When I thought something might be outdated, I'd research further to see if there was something more current to refute what I'd read. I didn't find anything. It was generally either more of the same or worse.
You're welcome to come insult us but it would be more productive if you'd come with links to specific information that refutes something you've read in a particular post.
Thanks...
Smidgen
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