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1. Inside the Fence (The Danville Register & Bee)
2. Wisdom Over Speed (Roanoke Times)
3. Suspicion Clouds Uranium-Ban Study (The Virginia-Pilot) |
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EDITORIAL: INSIDE THE FENCE
The Danville Register & Bee -
August 22, 2008
Chatham Mayor George Haley isn’t convinced that uranium mining is a good thing.
On that score, Haley’s not alone.
But the former Pittsylvania County supervisor has come up with a novel way to force the issue. He wants Chatham to consider a chemical trespass ordinance like the one that passed in the town of Halifax.
The gist of the ordinance is that any company mining uranium ore in Pittsylvania County would have to keep its pollution away from the town.
Local governments in Virginia are subservient to the state, which itself is frequently overruled by the feds. So if Richmond eventually lifts the state’s moratorium on uranium mining and, together with the federal rules, Virginia Uranium Inc. starts to mine the Coles Hill deposit, the towns of Chatham and Halifax aren’t going to be able to do much about it.
The real issue isn’t whether a town’s chemical trespass ordinance is enforceable, but what it symbolizes — a deep concern for the ability of any uranium mining company using any mining method to contain radioactivity in an environment like the one found in Pittsylvania County.
“It’s going to change the complexity of this place,” Haley said. “I am very much against uranium mining. Would you want to live in a mining town?”
To that question, VUI has consistently argued that yes, local people would want to live in a mining town with well-paid technicians and miners, local businesses getting subcontracts and tax revenues flowing into the county’s treasury.
Haley isn’t convinced.
“I want to be proven wrong,” he said of his concerns. Haley believes uranium mining “would change the lifestyle of this great county for the benefit of a few investors. I don’t think they’ve got anything to offer. I think they’re pretty slick.”
When the issue of a chemical trespass ordinance first came up, we wrote that Virginia Uranium should support the town of Halifax’s proposed ordinance because the company says that environmental safety is one of its highest principles, along with “sound economic development and the well being of the community and region.”
We still believe that.
If uranium mining is as safe as VUI says it is and it’s not going to affect the surrounding environment in a negative way, Chatham should be able to ban Coles Hill radiation from the town limits — because it’s never going to get there. Right?
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EDITORIAL: WISDOM OVER SPEED
Roanoke Times - March 6, 2008
Virginia needs alternative energy sources. But the House is right to see that need shouldn't translate into speed when dealing with uranium.
A House committee Monday effectively killed for the year a controversial study on whether uranium can be mined safely in Virginia.
Proponents bewailed the move as useless foot-dragging -- government inaction when the country needs bold action to develop alternative energy sources. But nothing about uranium, the radioactive material used to produce nuclear energy, should be hurried.
Any mistake in mining uranium or handling and storing the waste can have devastating effects on the environment for a millennium.
Yet the state Senate seemed to be in a hurry, indeed, this year.
Senators voted 36 to 4 last month to set up a commission that would oversee a corporate-sponsored National Academy of Sciences study on the safety of such an undertaking. A vote for a study would seem to be a simple vote against ignorance. But opponents fear the study's conclusion is preordained and would be used as leverage to end Virginia’s moratorium on uranium mining. They have some reason to worry.
Consider:
The bill's sponsor, Sen. Frank Wagner of Virginia Beach, is a nuclear energy proponent.
The study would be paid for by a company sitting on a Pittsylvania County uranium deposit that could be worth as much as $10 billion.
And the Senate wrote into its budget plan a directive to the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy to assess "the feasibility of establishing, implementing and overseeing a state program for the regulation of uranium mining."
Yet Virginia has banned uranium mining for 25 years. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission says uranium is mined in dry, sparsely populated parts of the West, and has never been mined on the East Coast.
Del. Watkins Abbitt of Appomattax made the successful motion that the House Rules Committee table the Senate bill, killing it until next year. Abbitt said he sat on the House panel that studied the Pittsylvania site 25 years ago and found that mining it probably would be safe. It's what's left after the mining -- the tailings -- that concerned lawmakers then and concerns many of them still.
Wagner denounced as absurd an alternative proposal to study what a uranium mining study should cover. Not so, if lawmakers think questions about post-mining operations would go unaddressed.
House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith of Salem, who lined up on the side of delay, noted, "I do think we ought to study it. I just don't think something that can affect the climate and quality of life for 2,000 years has to be done immediately."
Make haste slowly, Poor Richard advised. Ben Franklin's wisdom has never sounded more apt.
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SUSPICION CLOUDS MINING-BAN STUDY
The Virginian-Pilot - February 25, 2008
Nobody trusts anybody when it comes to uranium mining in Virginia, and probably with some reason.
Out in Pittsylvania County, Virginia Uranium believes it is sitting on billions of dollars worth of ore and is lobbying relentlessly in Richmond for a way to get it out of the ground.
That has made the simplest things immensely complicated.
When the company asked the county for a special-use permit to build a warehouse and office, the request became an object of intense interest, including in Hampton Roads, which drinks from reservoirs downstream of the proposed mine.
When there was movement in Richmond to limit citizen oversight of air and water protection, some considered it a way to clear the way for uranium mining. The proposal was largely dropped, after opposition built.
When Virginia Beach Sen. Frank Wagner - a proponent of nuclear energy - pushed to get the state to study uranium mining, it kicked off an absolute firestorm. Some worry that the legislation goes beyond a simple study; some think the legislature intends to make uranium mining inevitable.
That interpretation got additional impetus last week, when a budget amendment by Senate Majority Leader Richard Saslaw appeared to order the development of new rules and regulations on mining, which is currently banned in Virginia.
Since the 1980s, nobody has seriously looked at the safety of lifting Virginia's moratorium. That's precisely the point of Wagner's legislation. Unfortunately, the legislation is complicated, with moving parts, subjunctive phrasing, conditions piled on conditions. Couple that with Wagner's vocal support for nuclear energy, and you have a recipe for suspicion.
Add Saslaw's initiative, and environmentalists are right to worry that they're being taken for a ride. It is far too easy to see all this as a furtive rush to open Virginia to uranium mining.
Whether it is or not, Virginia should slow things down.
Even done well, mining is a dangerous, dirty, toxic business. This business, which happens to be radioactive, would be upstream from the water supply that quenches thirsts across Hampton Roads. That raises plenty of questions, all of which need to be answered before Virginia even considers turning one shovelful.
A decision this important and irreversible can and should come only after meticulous consideration and long deliberation. A study scrupulously confined to determining the safety of uranium mining is the first - and should be the only - step Virginia takes.
That study should be given all the time, money and expertise it needs to be as exhaustive and independent as any study can be. What that study concludes should determine whether the state even takes the next step at all. |
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