The new hot spot   

                                                            by Tom McLaughlin
 
You have to appreciate the soft sell that Walter Coles, one of the owners of the Coles Mill uranium site in Pittsylvania County, brought to the Southside Concerned Citizens meeting last Thursday night in Halifax. Coles was the very essence of gentility and reasonableness as he assured local residents that uranium mining would take place on his property only if his own concerns about public health and safety were fully satisfied.
To be fair to Mr. Coles, he didn’t have to walk into the maw of the opposition — SCC fought uranium mining like the dickens two decades ago — to share his thoughts and ask for the group’s input. Coles could have adopted the standard pitch for mining and drilling projects, exemplified by one Dick Cheney, who prefers to keep people in the dark about his evil plans. This approach might work for the leader of the free world; it probably wouldn’t work for Mr. Coles and his group. It’s wonderful to be nice and polite and all that, but let’s not go overboard making a virtue out of a necessity. If Mr. Coles were spending all his time skulking around in the shadows, how much, really, would that help his cause?
The expressions of concern for the environment and repeated assurances by the mine site owners that they have nothing but the best interests of Southside Virginia in mind recalls the famous saying by Upton Sinclair that it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him believing otherwise. Only we’re not talking about an ordinary salary here, but a lump in the ground worth an estimated $10 billion. Given the dollar sum involved, you can excuse the Coles and Bowen families of Pittsylvania County if they ultimately conclude that, yes, uranium can be mined safely in Southside. SCC President Jack Dunavant put the matter best Thursday when he said “If someone found $10 billion of a mineral on my property, I’d want to get it out, too.” Indeed.
For the rest of us, the calculus is very much different. I hate to be cynical, but Mr. Coles’ how-de-do visit with the SCC was merely an opening act in what is shaping up as a looming disaster for the region. There was a lot of talk Thursday about withholding judgment until all the facts are in; until then, we’re told, best to keep ears and minds open. Well, that would be a lot easier to accept if there weren’t so much money already poised to turn Southside and Central Virginia into Nuclear Alley. Mr. Coles let drop that AREVA, a French multinational, is eyeing the Lynchburg area as the potential site for a $3 billion uranium enrichment plant. When pressed to explain why people shouldn’t conclude that the fix is in for his project — enrichment plants are typically built near mines — Mr. Coles averred that there was nothing new about AREVA’s plans and that the Richmond, Lynchburg and Danville papers had covered the story. Sorry, I read the Times-Dispatch fairly religiously and have seen nothing there, and a Danville editor I talked to this week said neither his paper nor the Lynchburg News & Advance had reported the news about AREVA prior to Thursday’s meeting. In other words, the only people being urged to stay on the sidelines are you and me.
And by the way, anyone who puts great stock in official pledges to “thoroughly study the issues” would do well to remember that a legislative commission concluded back in the mid-1980s that uranium could be mined safely in Pittsylvania County. From the standpoint of getting a different result this time, not much has changed in the intervening two decades, other than industry claims that it has greatly improved waste disposal technologies. People labor under the impression that Southside Virginians beat uranium mining once before and therefore we can do so again, but what gets lost in the fog of history is the fact that the mining business wasn’t so much scared off as it imploded. Prices that dropped to below $10 a pound in the mid-1980s have rebounded to $85 today as the nuclear business wages a comeback. It’s nice to think we have an upper hand in this debate, but is that really true?
Walter Coles told the SCC that he doesn’t possess the technical expertise to adequately address all the concerns that people raised Thursday night. Fine. There will be plenty of time for more authoritative discussions later on. But what if behind Mr. Coles’ pat answer there lurks a larger problem, of an industry that fundamentally cannot allay concerns about health and safety?
Uranium mining cannot be done without exposing the public to some level of risk. This is not a controversial position; the only question is how much risk, and how these risks weigh against the benefits. The last point is not insignificant inasmuch as nuclear power is an emission-free alternative to fossil fuels, which cause global warming. Halifax County already has some pretty dirty air; according to www.scorecard.org, a clearinghouse for EPA pollution data, Halifax ranks in the 90th percentile nationally for airborne releases of cancerous chemicals. Few activities are risk free. The question is: Does uranium mining represent a special category of risk? Is nuclear power a viable alternative to coal-fired plants or merely a matter of trading in one set of problems for another, more vexing set?
Of this I am quite certain: There’s no place for uranium mining in a wet, populated area such as Southside Virginia. Yet that’s exactly what proponents have proposed for Coles Hill. The Department of Energy in a 2004 report* notes that there are only about a half-dozen uranium mines in operation in the U.S., all in arid, sparsely populated areas out west. Here’s a description of the mining and milling process, straight from DOE:

A uranium mill is a chemical plant designed to extract uranium from mined ore. A conventional mill uses uranium ore from either open pit or deep mining. The mined ore is brought to the milling facility by truck where the ore is crushed and leached. The leaching agent not only extracts uranium from the ore, but also other constituents like molybdenum, vanadium, selenium, iron, lead, and arsenic. Sulfuric acid is usually the leaching agent, but alkaline leaching can also be used. The extraction processes concentrates the uranium into a uranium-oxygen compound (U3O8) called yellow cake because of its yellowish color. The remainder of the crushed rock, in processing fluid slurry, is called “tailings”.

It is extremely likely that any operation at Coles Hill would be an open-pit mine which, according to DOE, “produces large amounts of radioactive waste material …. The volume of waste produced by surface, open-pit mining is a factor of approximately 45 greater than for underground mining….” This waste rock, by the way, is separate from the tailings themselves, which remain toxic for at least 80,000 years. You have to have a pretty low level of concern for the folly of man to believe that private industry, or the government, or whoever, can protect the public from a glowing pile of radioactive dust for the next 80 millenia. Ten billion dollars of ore extraction, 500 jobs and billions of dollars of investment are admittedly big numbers. But how do they rate when compared to the detritus left behind?
Walter Coles and his company, Virginia Uranium, deserve credit for engaging the public with news of their plans. But this is going to be a hard fight — for them and for us. There’s a lot more at stake here than maintaining one’s place in polite society. Mr. Coles has his work cut out for him. And so do we.

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*U.S. Second National Report-Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, available online (PDF) at www.energy.gov/. Go to the search field and type “em-0654, rev. 1.”