Supporters, critics of uranium mining face off

RICHMOND

Critics and supporters of the contentious proposal to mine uranium in Virginia faced off Thursday in a daylong discussion here, one of the last times opponents will meet before a key science report is published next month.

The advocates tried to retain their civility at the forum, sponsored by the Garden Club of Virginia at the University of Richmond, but things blew up at a lunchtime news conference, with each side accusing the other of distorting facts and hiding information.

"You don't think this is a billion-dollar enterprise?" asked Patrick Wales, project manager for Virginia Uranium Inc., the company that wants to tap one of the largest uranium deposits in the United States.

"No, I do not," replied Olga Kolotushkina, policy director for the Roanoke River Basin Association, saying she believes the company is inflating the value of the project. Echoing concerns of other environmental groups, Kolotushkina added, "All we get from this company are promises in press releases and newspaper ads."

It has been several years since Virginia Uranium announced its intentions to seek government approval for mining as much as 110 million pounds of uranium beneath a historic farm called Coles Hill in Pittsylvania County, about 200 miles west of Norfolk.

First, the company must persuade state lawmakers to overturn a mining ban, enacted in 1982 after the discovery of uranium in the rocky rolling hills of Southside Virginia. Company officials hope to do just that in the upcoming General Assembly session.

They have hired an army of lobbyists, and are promising more than 200 jobs and scads of domestic nuclear fuel, which produces no harmful greenhouse gases.

"This is vital to our national goal of energy independence," said Robert Bodnar, a geochemistry professor at Virginia Tech, who supports uranium mining.

Before taking sides, Gov. Bob McDonnell has said, he will wait for the findings of a study by the National Academy of Sciences, a document in the works for more than a year. It is expected to be released in December, a month before lawmakers convene in Richmond.

For Hampton Roads, drinking water is perhaps the biggest concern. The mining of the radioactive resource, along with the storage of tons of waste materials known as tailings, would occur 100 miles upstream of Lake Gaston, a reservoir supplying much of the water to Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Chesapeake.

Joe Bouchard, a former state delegate from Norfolk, reminded the packed audience Thursday that Lake Gaston also provides drinking water to military installations throughout Hampton Roads. The risks of an accident contaminating water for downstream communities and the military, he said, are immense.

"National security risks are profound with this project and cannot be ignored," said Bouchard, a former commanding officer of Norfolk Naval Station.

If the mining ban were overturned and permits granted, the project would be one of the first of its kind east of the Mississippi River.

Ninety percent of the uranium used to stoke nuclear reactors in the United States is imported, with the rest extracted from sites in Texas, Arizona and Wyoming. Other projects are pending in Western states.

There is only one mill, in Utah, operating today in the United States. There, rocks are smashed, chemicals deployed and raw uranium ore, known as yellowcake, is separated.

Of the countries producing uranium, France has about the closest conditions to those in Virginia, such as rainfall, climate and temperature. France, however, has stopped mining uranium; but it continues to oversee operations elsewhere in the world to feed its immense appetite for nuclear power.

Wales, the Virginia Uranium executive, conceded that the French mining record is "a mixed bag" and that projects there have contaminated downstream waters in the past.

"But they also have some of the best projects you'll see anywhere," Wales said. The keys, he and others stressed, are tough regulations and strict enforcement of them - factors that environmental groups say are rare in Virginia.

Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, said the state has a poor track record of regulating industries and spends only 1 percent of its budget on agencies that protect natural resources.

"We want to rest our hopes on that?" Miller asked the audience.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com