Science Loses Out to Politics in Nuke Study

On Monday afternoon in a committee hearing room in the state Capitol, science took a right hook to the chin.

Beneath the soil of Pittsylvania County, near the county seat of Chatham, lies perhaps the largest uranium deposit in the continental United States. Virginia Uranium, a company founded by property owner Walter Coles, wants to extract the ore, worth an estimated $10 billion. Standing in its way, however, is a 24-year-old moratorium on uranium mining enacted by the General Assembly in 1983.

Virginia Uranium and its allies in the Assembly proposed a study, as a first step, to examine the question of whether mining could be done safely using today’s modern techniques. Fears about the safety of mining 25 years ago were the basis for the moratorium, but in the intervening decades, mining technology has undergone a revolution, begging the question of whether it could now be done safely.

That was the sole intent of SB 525, legislation introduced by Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach. As amended in the Senate, a blue-ribbon panel of experts and stakeholders, appointed by the governor and General Assembly, would be directed to contract with an organization along the lines of the National Academy of Sciences to conduct the safety and feasibility study.
In the Senate, Wagner accepted a number of changes to his original legislation proposed by environmentalists and Southside Concerned Citizens, an environmental group based in Halifax County. (Halifax,
by the way, is downstream from the uranium site, sparking fears on the part of some folks about groundwater contamination by leachate from trailings, the leftover material from the mining process.)

But apparently it still wasn’t enough for the folks opposed even to a study of mining.

Dels. Watkins Abbitt, I-Appomattox, and Clarke Hogan, R-Halifax, proposed amending Wagner’s bill to simply call for a study of whether to conduct a study at all. When Wagner objected, the House panel decided to hold the bill over until the 2009 session. Del. Lacey Putney, I-Bedford, joined Abbitt in voting to hold the bill over.

Nationally and globally, energy demand is on the rise. Just look at the price of a gallon of gas, the cost of a barrel of crude oil or how much your last electric bill was. Most energy experts are slowly coming to the opinion that the world’s production of oil, the life blood of the global economy, has peaked and is on a downward trend, just as demand is taking off in the opposite direction.

The bottom line is that alternative sources of energy need to be developed. The United States currently gets about a fifth of its energy needs from nuclear power; in Europe, that percentage is much greater. Climate change, which experts believe has been speeded up by use of fossil fuels, gives added impetus to need to develop sources of power.

Even Al Gore, the leading global warming activist, believes nuclear power has a role to play in this nation’s future.

But apparently, fears based upon possibly outdated science and that old “Not in my backyard” syndrome have trumped science and concerns for America’s energy independence.

The question of whether to study mining’s safety is all but dead for this session of the Assembly, but it will come back in 2009.

Perhaps by then more rational heads will have prevailed.