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Del. R. Lee Ware Jr. (R-Powhatan) recently stated that mining for uranium in Southside VA will be a "marquee issue" during the next session of the General Assembly starting on January 11.
If it already wasn't clear that uranium mining could shape up to be one of the most divisive and important issues in VA politics since the issue of slavery, you just heard from one of the horse's mouths.
The recent release of the National Academy of Sciences report on uranium mining in VA appeared to both vindicate those in favor of uranium mining as well as those opposed.
The NAS pointed out that there are substantial risks involved in the mining of uranium, especially in VA's case, but that these risks could be reduced through the use of "modern mining techniques."
Of course, an assumption made by the NAS is that companies who mine and mill the uranium ore will be willing and able to pay for modern mining techniques both now and decades into the future. There's absolutely no certainty this will occur.
But notice also that risk cannot be eliminated, merely reduced. Reduced to what, you may ask? Unfortunately, the risks involved with uranium mining and milling are ubiquitous and difficult to quantify for the purposes of measurement and ultimate reduction.
If you really want to know why so many Virginians fear and oppose uranium mining and milling in our state, one only needs to look at the human and environmental health track record of mining and milling efforts across the country over the past 30 years. The results are as grim as the lungs of coal miners.
No amount of economic development and energy independence can give back the lives that are cut short due to mining and milling uranium ore.
Would you want one of your family members in a uranium mine or at a uranium milling facility?
On Tuesday, Gov. Bob McDonnell stated that public safety overrides the possible economic gains stemming from uranium mining in Southside VA. For Virginians in the south, this is particularly good news. For the commonwealth as a whole, this should also come as a breath of fresh air.
While Gov. McDonnell's announcement is far from a renouncement of uranium mining in Southside VA, it does leave the door open for the status quo on the uranium mining ban to hold.
For the past two years in particular, Virginia Uranium has thrown a slew of lobbyists into the legislative mix to influence VA legislators regarding their decisions on whether or not to lift the ban on uranium mining.
With all of the lobbyists hounding at the doors of VA legislators, however, the decision on whether to retain the ban may come down to the concern Virginians publicly show towards uranium mining.
If Virginians concerned about the possible human and environmental consequences get involved in the debate over uranium mining, and in particular voice their concerns to their respective legislators, then the default position on lifting the ban may fall towards the status quo.
For anyone in VA who doesn't feel like they have or will have a voice in this debate, I'd like them to know that they do. In fact, your involvement may be the difference between an environmental and human health disaster and a more reasoned approach towards uranium mining in VA.
So please take a few minutes out of your day to get involved and let your voice be heard. Virginia still has a republican form of government and ultimately your concerns do matter.
Just as responsible parents wouldn't rush into making potentially life-altering decisions regarding their children, so to shouldn't responsible legislators of the General Assembly rush into making decisions about the future of uranium mining in Virginia until further research has been conducted and the legislators themselves have had time to digest the plethora of studies, analyses, and reports that have sprung up over the last two years alone. Putting residents of Virginia at risk is the antithesis of what our state government has been set up to do.
But even before residents of Virginia look at each analysis as equal in objectivity, we each have to ascertain who actually paid for each analysis and what their interests are in having the analysis performed. What are the interests and motivations of those seeking to lift the ban on uranium mining? What are the interests and motivations of those seeking to keep the ban in place?
Greed has all too often blinded those who have sought to undertake one project or another to the true consequences of their actions. Money is a powerful force that can turn facts into fiction, temperance into excess, and civility into rudeness. What's at stake in the case of uranium mining in Southside Virginia, however, are the lives and well-being of thousands of Virginians in southern Virginia. The potential for this issue to affect millions of additional Virginians is ever present, but little discussed, as well.
The uranium subcommittee of the Virginia Commission on Coal and Energy recently discussed the Chmura study, released last week, with an audience in Southside VA. The Chmura study assessed the socioeconomic impacts of uranium mining. It's one of many that has the potential to sway the General Assembly's decision on whether or not to lift the ban on uranium mining in VA.
At the meeting, audience members were given the opportunity to ask questions regarding the study.
The final conclusion of the Chmura study was that jobs would be created through the milling and mining of uranium, but there would also be a stigma associated with farming and tourism.
But there was never really any question about whether uranium mining in VA would create jobs. Of course it would.
The real questions are, what kind of jobs would be created and how many?
Since Virginia doesn't have a trained workforce specializing in the extraction and milling of uranium ore, Virginia Uranium Inc. (the major company vying to lift the uranium mining ban to mill and mine the substance) would either have to train Virginians to do these jobs or more likely, bring trained workers from Canada or elsewhere to do many of the most skilled jobs.
Here's another question rarely asked, do Southside Virginians even want uranium mining in their part of the state? The answer has been overwhelmingly "no."
So if Southside Virginians don't want uranium mining taking place in their section of the woods, what gives any company the right to go ahead with the extraction and milling of uranium for "economic development?"
It seems that in 21st Century Virginia, individual rights and liberties are only respected if they do not impede economic growth.
At the Virginia Conservation Network's General Assembly preview at the Capitol Building in Richmond on Saturday, the agenda for conservationists and lovers of human health was laid out for the upcoming General Assembly session beginning in January.
The 2012 General Assembly session stands to be another year of tough battles for the conservationist community as issues such as clean energy credits, uranium mining, the Chesapeake Bay restoration, and a number of other important environmental issues face tough and well-financed opposition groups.
The case of uranium mining in Southside Virginia will perhaps be the most hard-fought and consequential issue for the lives of thousands, if not millions, of Virginians. If the ban on uranium mining is lifted, opponents of uranium mining say that it is only a matter of time before the drinking water for over a million Virginians is contaminated with radioactive "waste."
Given the close proximity of the Coles Hill uranium mining site to communities and large living areas in every direction, not to mention a number of important bodies of water, it's difficult to imagine how such a novel form of uranium mining and milling would be undertaken without disastrous consequences.
Were uranium to be mined and milled in Virginia, it would be the first such case in a state with more rainfall than evaporation, creating a level of uncertainty about the safety of the entire process that simply cannot be ignored.
A point that should be stressed is that if the General Assembly decides to lift the ban for uranium mining only in Southside Virginia, it will only be a matter of time before the exception of Southside VA becomes the rule throughout the entire state. That is to say, uranium mining could spread throughout Virginia. Do you want that in your backyard?
In what has become one of the few non-uranium mining industry reports on the possible effects of the proposed uranium mining and milling projects at Coles Hill, the Roanoke River Basin Association (RRBA) released its own site-specific report.
In brief, the report concluded that the uranium mining site at Coles Hill would lead to long-term and "chronic degradation" of water quality while increasing competition for water in the Roanoke River Basin.
The report comes a month before the National Academy of Sciences is set to release their own report on the potential effects of the Coles Hill uranium mining site.
The recent report released by RRBA was completed by longtime researcher and manager of water quality, Dr. Robert Moran.
Despite the uranium mining industry funded studies which have concluded that uranium mining at the Coles Hill site poses few credible dangers, Virginians know intuitively that operations like these do not occur in vacuums. That is, the chances of radioactive uranium tailings entering local water sources are far from remote.
Amid the claims and counterclaims regarding the safety of uranium mining in Southside Virginia, one can hardly give credence to the conclusions of an industry with so much to gain from the lifting of VA's moratorium of uranium mining. As with most things in our own time, you only need to follow the money to gain a better picture of reality.
But if the ban were lifted in VA, the reality for many Virginians in Pittsylvania County would undoubtedly become bleak fairly quickly.
VA should seek diverse forms of energy to power its future. There is, however, a right way and a wrong way. Without reservation, lifting the ban on uranium mining would be categorized under the latter.
Does Virginia Tech's Board of Governors know something the rest of Virginia doesn't about the potential for uranium mining in VA's southern region?
On Monday, VA Tech's Board of Governors gave the go-ahead to a proposed master's and doctoral degree program in nuclear engineering, paving the way for more trained workers in the nuclear industry in Virginia.
According to VA Tech, the proposed graduate and doctoral degree programs could start as early as 2013 if they are also okayed by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Of course, maybe these new programs are simply the result of existing market forces which will need a newer generation of trained nuclear engineers as the older generation heads into retirement.
However, the programs proposal comes at a moment in Virginia's political timeline when the issue of uranium mining in southern VA is to be decided next year.
Given this pending decision and Virginia Tech's ties to Virginia Uranium Inc. (the primary company lobbying for a lift to the ban on uranium mining in VA), the decision to create a set of higher-level nuclear engineering programs seems more than a coincidence.
Let's hope for the sake of all Virginian's that nuclear engineers won't be needed to fill any new nuclear-related positions anytime in the foreseeable future, unless, of course, it's to decommission those already in existence.
Don't let the brilliance of this suggestion made by VA Sen. John Watkins (R-Midlothian) blow you away: the VA General Assembly may analyze VA's regulatory structure of the uranium mining industry before a decision is made to lift the "moratorium" on uranium mining. Brilliant indeed! Well Sen. Watkins, first things first. If special permits are to be granted for uranium mining operations and a strict regulatory structure is to be promulgated, the agency(s) in charge will actually need the appropriate funds and manpower to undertake these charges. In our current political environment, who in the General Assembly is willing to spend extra on these important components of a lift on VA's uranium mining moratorium? Further, how long will this budgetary largesse last?
Perhaps, instead, the General Assembly decides to shift money from other, no less important programs, to fund the regulation of uranium mining. Where will the money be taken from, children's cancer research, infrastructure upgrades, afterschool programs? The possibilities are limitless!
Here's a fabulously preposterous line from a full page ad released in the Danville Register and Bee on 9/28/2011 by Virginia Uranium Inc.:
For our company, stewardship of the land is more than a corporate principle; it is a deeply ingrained way of life that has sustained six generations of farmers, each striving to pass on this land in a better condition than they found it.
Better condition than they found it? How exactly do you dig up tremendous swaths of land and uranium ore and expect to leave the land "in a better condition?" Virginians in particular, and Americans in general, have seen this marketing game played before by natural resource pillagers, claiming on the one hand ideas of stewardship, intergenerational justice, and corporate social responsibility while kowtowing to the scriptures of capitalism. In effect, the consequence of the latter is a complete negation of the former, the complete dismissal of public-faced claims of stewardship.
Virginians should not and do not buy the land stewardship argument because it assumes that companies like Virginia Uranium Inc. will be willing and able to spend millions of dollars and years of time to clean up the environmental mess that it will inevitably leave behind. How many mining companies have been such rigorous stewards of the land? No, fellow Virginians, let's not be fooled by this lofty rhetoric. Let's turn our attention to renewable sources of energy, not deadly ones.
The Roanoke Times recently published an article claiming that a number of representatives in the VA General Assembly are waiting until the release of a National Academy of Science (NAS) study before taking a stance on the issue of uranium mining in southern Virginia. The report itself is due at the end of the year.
The NAS study was conducted as a result of one interest groups efforts to lift VA's 30 year old moratorium on uranium mining. Before the start of the 2012 VA General Assembly, a proposal to lift the 3 decades long moratorium is expected.
Virginia Uranium Inc. (VUI), a partly Canadian owned mining company based in VA, has spent close to $100,000 over the past 36 months to lobby members of the General Assembly to lift the moratorium on uranium mining.
Aside from the dubious fact that VUI is partly owned by entrepreneurs residing in a foreign country and the novelty of mining for uranium in unprecedented climatic conditions, Virginians shouldn't be fooled by VUI's rhetoric about the safety of uranium mining in Virginia or its lofty claims of job creation or communal responsibility.
We live in a capitalist society, one that gives companies like VUI little incentive to "clean up the mess" once one has been created.
Given the nature of uranium mining and the radioactive tailings that are left behind on the surface as a byproduct, there will almost certainly be a mess, one that could lead to very adverse human and environmental health problems.
VA should aim for energy independence in a safe and sustainable manner. Uranium mining in VA will only create more problems than it helps solve.
According to the U2011 list of pro-uranium all-stars, our friends at Virginia Uranium Inc. will be giving their two cents on uranium, uranium mining, and uranium's future in America. One has to therefore ask, does Virginia Uranium consider itself a shoe-in for the lucrative uranium mining contract in southside Virginia if the moratorium is lifted?
In the case of uranium mining in Pittsylvania County, Virginians are not only fighting for the human and environmental health of communities and ecosystems surrounding the proposed mining sites, Virginians may also be fighting to halt uranium mining around there own communities. According to a few geologists at Virginia Tech (let me know if you want the source document), as the technology advances to find uranium mines throughout the country, it's well believed that the Piedmont area in particular may be the next uranium hot spot. That is, it's believed that there are considerable uranium deposits in the Piedmont area of Virginia. But let's set this point aside for the moment.
Even if new uranium mines are not blown open in other areas of Virginia, the recent storm events in Virginia and the unceasing precipitation should be a warning to the potential of uranium ore deposits to find its way into local aquifers. The process is safe, VUI says, but what definitive (keyword!) proof have they offered? None. At the very least, researchers have called for further studies into the possible effects of uranium millings leaking into local bodies of water.
Sure, we may need nuclear power as a matter of practicality. But the issue of lifting the moratorium on uranium mining is about, above all else, money. That's right, money, the stuff that will make companies lie to stakeholders about the potential safety of a given process (like uranium mining!).
So, let's not be fooled by the "energy independence" rhetoric. If Virginia's business leaders and politicians were truly concerned about energy independence, we would have attempted to decrease our reliance on nondomestic sources of energy many years ago. Why now? And why in a relatively non-affluent area of Virginia are we deciding to find our spirit of energy independence? We all have a voice, let's use it before they begin digging in our backyards as well.
Check out this recent Letter to the Editor in the Fredericksburg Free Lance Star, "Fredericksburg area: Next uranium target?" Graham Givens is a junior at the University of Mary Washington concerned that if the ban is lifted, drinking water at UMW could be threatened.
Fredericksburg Free Lance Star Date published: 8/5/2011*
A recent AP article ["Geologists: Virginia's OK of uranium mining "] is a strong reminder of how much is at stake if the nearly 30-year ban on uranium mining is lifted this January.
Geologists on both sides have agreed that there are other deposits of uranium throughout the state, besides the site in Pittsylvania County, where mining operations could occur.
Though Virginia Uranium, the company interested in mining uranium in Virginia, has stated that its only intention is to mine the deposits in Pittsylvania County, it has told its investors, "To this day Coles Hill is the first of more major discoveries in Virginia." So what will happen if the ban is lifted this January?
One thing is for certain: Uranium mining across the state could threaten millions of Virginians' access to safe, clean drinking water, and the Fredericksburg area could feel the full effect of mining operations.
The benefits of uranium mining in Virginia, sure, there are some. There are also benefits to undergoing chemotherapy, but you don't want to reach the point where you have to harm your body with radiation to sustain yourself! That is, there are viable alternatives to uranium mining in Virginia like wind energy, solar power, geothermal, and biomass that don't pack the harmful punch that uranium mining does.
If extracting radioactive materials out of the ground for energy use sounds like a frightening idea, that's because it is. But let's look beyond the "scary" factor of uranium mining. Even if uranium mining were relatively safe, there is no guarantee that Virginia and its residents will reap many of the benefits stemming from its extraction, refinement, and sale.
Indeed, the most certain aspect of uranium mining, judging from case studies of uranium mines across the country, is that they will leave a harmful environmental impact long after their final use. And given the sobering fact that Virginia is inexperienced in the process of uranium mining regulation, permit granting, and the like, it's most logical to conclude that this consequence may stand all the more chance of occurring.
Virginia Uranium Inc. has made a lot of claims about how "safe" their own operations will be as well as the benefits that their enterprise will bring to Virginia and in particular the economically stagnant areas of southern Virginia. But what if their operations don't turn out to be so safe if they are able to mine for uranium in VA? What will become of Pittsylvania County's residents or the public drinking water of Virginia Beach? Who actually knows that under EPA regulations, Virginia Uranium Inc. would be able to discharge wastewater consummate with the difference in average rainfall versus evaporation?
All of these questions, and many more, remain unanswered. The numbing silence is reflective of VUI's own blindness to anything but the benefits of mining for uranium in VA. Ultimately, once all of the facts have been laid out for the public, it should be those individuals who will be most directly affected by uranium mining who should be able to decide what course of action to pursue.
It's been two weeks now since I asked Senator Steve Martin (Republican) the following question in an email:
Senator Martin,
Thank you for your response.
I was hoping, since this is such a serious issue, you could provide me with evidence to support your claim that uranium mining in Virginia will be done safely?
Also, how many jobs are supposed to be added in Virginia if the moratorium on uranium mining is lifted? What are the actual numbers?
The email is as straight forward as it comes. Yet, I've received no response and therefore no evidence regarding the "safety" of uranium mining in Virginia or the number of jobs that would be created in Virginia were uranium mining to take place.
Senator Martin, who exactly are you representing? It certainly isn't the "average" Virginian.
In a recent move by Virginia's farmers, they're requesting that a National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing uranium mining in Virginia include a section on the potential impact on agriculture in its final report.
Over 5 water and environmental groups and 36 farmers have requested the panel include potential contamination risks to the food chain in its final report, which is expected to be released by the end of 2011.
Farmers are concerned about the possible impact that uranium mining may have on their products' marketability, according to the The Danville Register and Bee.
Not surprisingly, Virginia Uranium project manager Patrick Wales claims there are examples across the world where uranium mining and agriculture "thrive." However, uranium mining has never been done in a wet climate like Virginia's.
Given the nature of uranium mining and the ease with which radioactive particles can spread, it seems to stand to reason that surrounding agricultural and water supplies will not be negatively affected.
Also, given the novelty of mining for uranium in a climate like Virginia's, the certainties or uncertainties about its affects can be little more than speculation.
While scientific studies can claim that there is a certain potential for risk, their models usually leave out many real world nuances that could have a grave effect on the risks involved.
All this however also leaves out the issue of what to do with the discarded "tailings."
Bottom line, Virginia has gotten along just fine without uranium mining and if we come together to find better and more innovative solutions, I know we continue to get along without it.
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