Uranium Mining Opposed By Citizens Group Leaders

Jack Dunavant and Wallace Nunn traveled to Martinsville on 12/16/08 to speak to the Rotary Club.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

By KIM BARTO - Bulletin Staff Writer

The head of a Southside citizens group spoke out against mining a Pittsylvania County uranium deposit during a Martinsville Rotary Club meeting Tuesday night.

Jack Dunavant of Halifax County, an engineer and chairman of Southside Concerned Citizens (SCC), said he does not believe uranium can be mined safely in Virginia, citing the risk of radiation exposure and the creation of waste products that he said remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Virginia Coal and Energy Commission, chaired by Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, has agreed to study the possibility of uranium mining in the state, which passed a moratorium on it in 1981.

Virginia Uranium Inc., a company formed in 2007 by Chatham families whose land sits above an untapped uranium deposit believed to be the largest in the country, has expressed interest in tapping the estimated 119 million pounds of ore under the Coles Hill site. The uranium there would be worth about $10 billion over 30 years, VUI geologist Patrick Wales told the Rotary Club in November. During his talk, Wales made the case that uranium mining at Coles Hill could be done safely.

However, Dunavant said Tuesday there is no sure way to protect the air, water and local people from contamination. “(Uranium) has never been mined anywhere safely,” Dunavant said during the meeting.

“There’s nothing good that comes out of this, except a few people are going to get rich, and we’re going to be left with the price tag,” he said.

Dunavant said uranium waste sites would have to be “monitored forever,” and “any cleanup or remediation will be at taxpayer expense.” He said he has “not made a judgment” about using nuclear power, but he opposes mining east of the Mississippi.

He handed out information from the Southern Environmental Law Center stating that “virtually all uranium mining in the U.S. has occurred in sparsely populated areas of the arid west.”

Mining in Virginia, a more densely populated area with much higher precipitation levels, would risk water contamination from seepage or flooding, according to the SELC.

“Mining can be done much more safely in arid regions, and this is certainly not the place,” Dunavant said. “You don’t want a really wet area like we have here; you want desert” to lower the risk of water contamination.

Waste products left over from uranium processing, called tailings, would have to be contained, and the liquid waste would be impounded in massive slurry ponds.

The SELC stated these wastes pose the risk of spreading through wind or leakage. Dunavant did calculations showing how much waste would be produced from mining 110 million pounds of uranium at Cole’s Hill. The amount of usable uranium ore extracted from mined rock can be as low as a half-pound per ton, according to the SELC.

Based on that figure, mining would create enough radioactive tailings that if the waste was stacked in a triangle 200 feet tall and 400 feet wide at the base, it would be 14 miles long, Dunavant said.

“The danger is not so much that you’re going to stand next to yellowcake (uranium) and get irradiated,” he said, but that people could ingest the dust and radon gas produced by mining operations, causing cancer.

“The problem is, radiation is cumulative,” he said, meaning exposure causes radiation to build up in the body, “and if you get enough, it’ll do you in.”

Dunavant urged people not to “let the genie out of the bottle” by lifting the mining moratorium. “If they lift the ban, they can mine it anywhere,” Dunavant said.

He held up a map from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission showing there are strips of uranium deposits up and down Virginia. “If they do one (mine) in Pittsylvania County, they’ll have a precedent” to do it in places that may be upstream of Henry County, or in Henry County itself, he said.

Dunavant encouraged concerned residents to contact their political representatives and urge localities to adopt resolutions such as the one Virginia Beach issued earlier this month. The Virginia Beach City Council adopted a resolution Dec. 2 against uranium mining, citing fears the mining could threaten the city’s water supply.

When one Rotarian asked him if he thought technology has changed enough over the years to mine uranium safely, Dunavant answered, “If I thought that, sir, I wouldn’t be here tonight.”

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