Reasons Why the Uranium Mine Moratorium Must Stand

By Linda Goin on April 24th, 2009

Are you interested in the uranium mine project proposed for Pittsylvania County?

I am, because I lived just miles from Uravan, Colorado for almost a decade.

Therefore, I know what an abandoned uranium/vanadium-mining project looks like before Superfund clean-up begins. And, I know a fair amount of information about drilling and radiation, because I am related to a hydrogeologist in Colorado and I have learned much about this subject over the decades.

But, I do not live in Pittsylvania County, so you may wonder why I’m a proponent for upholding Virginia’s moratorium on uranium mining.

Uranium mining has left Superfund federal clean-up sites everywhere it has been conducted west of the Mississippi River and in facilities located east of the Mississippi.

In fact, many funds from recent stimulus packages are going to clean up uranium issues in areas where cleanup has been ignored for decades, such as in Moab, Utah and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Stimulus and Superfund cleanups are tax dollars at work, so any profit seen from uranium mining is mitigated by all Americans who pay taxes. That is just one issue.

The reason behind my interest in the Coles Hill Project in Pittsylvania County is that this project affects more people than those who live in that area.

Although local anti-mining proponents are active against this project in Pittsylvania County, this issue is far-reaching. It is a state-wide, inter-state, regional and national issue for the following reasons:

The mining project is slated for Coles Hill, which is located in northern southern Pittsylvania County.

This area is located just miles from Chatham and Gretna and near the Bedford, Campbell, Charlotte, Franklin and Henry County lines. It also is located just 51 miles south of Appomattox and 43 miles south of Lynchburg and is located near the North Carolina border as well.

The location is important, as this project is a proposed “open-pit” mining project, which involved “tailings,” or radioactive materials that are left near the mine and open to the elements.

These tailings must be kept damp, otherwise they are subject to blowing in any direction the wind blows.

One way to keep these tailings damp is to create “tailings ponds” that hold radioactive waste.

I witnessed such ponds at Uravan, and you can see the image of those ponds in the photograph above, taken before the Superfund cleanup.

These tailings were located near a major highway and next to the San Miguel River, a convenience to help keep the tailings wet. However, during Superfund cleanup, the report admits to a large volume of wastes left behind that contaminated the air, soil and groundwater near the defunct plant and the river.

Those contaminants included “raffinates, raffinate crystals and mill tailings containing uranium and radium. Other chemicals in the tailings and ground water were heavy metals, such as lead, arsenic, cadmium and vanadium.”

No uranium mining and milling operation has ever been licensed in the U.S. east of the Mississippi, because the region’s wet climate and high population make it too risky.

Another reason why uranium mining has not been licensed east of the Mississippi is because of the weather, which creates an atmosphere far different than Utah or Colorado, along with differences in humidity and altitude.

Although Hurricane Camille’s devastation was years ago and further north in Nelson County, storms and damage from floods and high winds have posed threats to Virginia’s residents many times.

How will this affect a uranium mine and its tailings ponds in this state? This is a factor that cannot be measured in any exploration of this issue, as no one can predict the weather one year out or more (let alone next week, in many cases).


The drinking water supply of Virginia Beach is downstream of the proposed mine, and other cities downstream from the proposed project include Fredericksburg and Richmond.

But, any realistic geologist will tell you that water supply contamination is not restricted to these areas.

Despite what some professionals might say, water does, indeed, flow uphill.

Otherwise, geysers would not exist. Water pressure and/or heat can force water through many seemingly solid substrata, or rock and soil layers beneath the soil. The water follows fracture trends and fissures, and those same pressures also force water to flow in different directions through those same openings in underground formations.

To address the inter-state issue, once the uranium from this mine is mined and milled, where do you think it goes?

It must go to a processing plant for enrichment so it can be used in various processes. At the moment, the only uranium processing plant in the U.S. is located in Paducah, Kentucky.

This means that the uranium must be shipped from Coles Hill across interstate highways to western Kentucky. This fact alone makes this mine and its product an interstate issue.

Finally, although some mining companies and government entities consider this a radical stance, I believe that drilling for exploration is a violation of the moratorium that Virginia has on uranium mining. (Amen, they broke the law!!)

Drilling is part of the mining process, and drilling alone disturbs all levels of substrata and opens problems where none existed before.

An open core hole can never, ever be sealed fully, as the integrity of that area has been violated by drilling.

In other words, when drilling fractures a rock layer, that rock layer has been changed forever, and it can never fully be “patched up.” Even if a process to create a seal is discovered and used in the future, that hole has forever changed water and air flow patterns underground and has released all sorts of underground chemicals and minerals.

Much drilling has been conducted on Coles Hill over the past twenty years, and I intend to address this subject within the next week.

In the meantime, I would please ask that you follow the links above and in the list below to learn more about uranium mining. This list of information, provided by the Virginia Conservation Network, also may help to understand the issues more.

And, I welcome any comments, but only on the information noted above.

I will be posting many more articles in the weeks to come, and hopefully those articles will help answer some questions about information not posted here yet.

Finally, I wish the above photo, which was taken from the Wikipedia article on Uravan, showed the actual colors of the tailings ponds.

You may find other photos, but they often are taken from a ‘birds-eye’ view, or above the ponds.

Those photographs show the blue reflected from a Colorado sky.

In reality, these ponds, at eye-level, were a ghastly chartreuse green, with oily-looking swirls that contained other colors produced by toxic chemicals. Did it look like something out of a science-fiction movie? Yes. Was it science fiction? No.

More links:
Virginia Conservation Network: These folks are for upholding Virginia’s moratorium and they have supplied some of the information for this piece. This link takes you directly to their statement on uranium mining in Virginia.
Piedmont Environmental Council: Learn about the uranium mining process, the harmful consequences associated with uranium mining, and what you can do to prevent the moratorium from being lifted.
WISE Uranium Project: This site, filled with tons of information, is part of the World Information Service on Energy.
Southern Environmental Law Center: SELC tackles all types of environmental projects, but this link takes you directly to their statement on the ban on uranium mining in Virginia.

http://www.appomattoxnews.com/2009/reasons-why-the-uranium-mine-moratorium-must-stand.html