A disaster waiting to happen

By Louis R. Jones

Virginia and Canadian mining companies want to mine huge deposits of uranium in Pittsylvania County, which is upstream of Kerr Reservoir and Lake Gaston. Lake Gaston is where Virginia Beach and Chesapeake withdraw up to 60 million gallons of water per day and pump that water to Norfolk's reservoirs in Suffolk. Water from Lake Gaston makes up a third to half of the water that flows to homes, businesses, hospitals and military installations in South Hampton Roads.

Loss of Lake Gaston water for a prolonged period would be an environmental and economic disaster.

Uranium mining generates vast quantities of waste tailings that retain 85 percent of the ore's radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years. Unlike the ore - solid rock buried hundreds of feet underground - the tailings are fine sand and clay-like particles, easily transported by air and water. These tailings are disposed of in landfills that - it is hoped - will immobilize them forever.

The known and potential uranium deposits in Virginia occur in geologic deposits at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. These same areas are particularly susceptible to damaging precipitation and flooding events, including storms that can drop 30 inches of rain in six hours. Two similar storms have occurred in Virginia in the past four decades. One storm was in Nelson County, less than 100 miles from the proposed mine. That storm sheared clean the sides of mountains. The other storm occurred in Madison County, one of the counties targeted for uranium mining leases.

Virginia Beach contracted with scientific experts to prepare a water quality and sediment transport model of the Roanoke River, including Kerr and Lake Gaston. That model proves that Virginia's hydrology can easily transport significant loads of radioactive tailings downstream. It also shows that if a tailings disposal cell were breeched as the result of a catastrophic storm, or for any other reason, the tailings could contaminate water supply intakes for years - and river and reservoir beds indefinitely.

Has such a catastrophic event occurred in other places? Absolutely. As the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrated, things that were not supposed to go wrong did go wrong. Failsafe devices failed.

The mining company has taken out full-page newspaper ads suggesting that it will bury the tailings below ground so that they can't be transported downstream. Read the ad and listen to the mining company's statements carefully; it never actually commits to below-grade disposal. Nor does the ad bother to mention that a previous engineering study rules out below-grade disposal at this very site due to unacceptable groundwater conditions.

The mining company's ad also says that Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations require that disposal cells be designed to last 1,000 years. Not true. NRC regulations mandate only that disposal cells be designed to last 200 years; 1,000 years is recommended but not required.

The recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, which the mining company quotes selectively, specifically stated that above-grade tailings disposal was a real possibility and could not be discounted.

In any event, state geologists concluded that the Nelson County storm caused 2,000 years of erosion in a single night. Such an event would be catastrophic for South Hampton Roads and many public water supplies in Virginia and North Carolina downstream of the proposed mine.

The moratorium on uranium mining in Virginia should not be lifted.

Louis R. Jones, vice mayor of Virginia Beach, has served as the council's Bayside representative from 1982 to 1986 and since 1990.