Two counties offer differing views on uranium mining

Ron Brown, co-owner of the Chathamooca coffee shop, says a proposed Pittsylvania County uranium mine could be good for the region and country.

“You have to take some risk” to find new energy sources, Brown said. Otherwise, the U.S. runs the risk of becoming a “second-rate nation.”

But next door to the east, in Halifax County, former nurse Sue Bailey said residents are a conservative lot who don’t take kindly to pollution flowing their way.

“People don’t much like change,” Bailey said. “They don’t like anything that threatens their way of life.”

Pittsylvania and Halifax in Southside Virginia share a lot — rolling green pastures, old tobacco barns and the scenic Banister River among them.

By most accounts, however, Pittsylvania is split over the mine proposal, while Halifax is a hotbed of opposition. The two counties exemplify the uranium debate — support for jobs and energy versus concerns over radioactive waste.

The debate will go on at least another year. Gov. Bob McDonnell last week ordered a state study of the mine site, to be done in time for the 2013 General Assembly.

McDonnell has often stated support for energy sources from nuclear to wind. But “we must be certain that uranium mining can be conducted safely and responsibly,” he said.

In Pittsylvania, population 63,500, a lot of people keep their opinions to themselves. “You don’t bring it up because this is such a hot topic,” Brown said.

Even the county’s Board of Supervisors has taken no position beyond saying the mine would have to be safe.

Halifax, population 36,240, isn’t so reticent. Political leaders and residents have expressed grave concerns over the mine. Halifax sees itself as downriver and downwind, in a position to suffer ill effects while reaping few benefits.

“We feel like we are right in the conduit of contamination,” said Jean Bainbridge, Bailey’s mother.

At Coles Hill, a historic family farm northeast of Chatham, Patrick Wales turned on a modern Geiger counter — technically a gamma spectrometer — which clicked contently for a few seconds before humming like a high-tech mosquito.

Like a prospector in countless movies, Wales had struck pay dirt — a deposit of uranium so remarkable that brown granite rocks laced with the radioactive metal lie about the handsome cow pasture.

“This is a very localized spot where the uranium actually does come to the surface,” Wales said.

A native of Danville, Wales is project manager for Virginia Uranium Inc., the company that wants to mine the 59,500-ton, $7 billion deposit. It’s considered the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the U.S.

People have known about the buried treasure for decades. In the early 1980s, a joint venture between Marline Uranium Corp. and Union Carbide proposed mining it. Virginia imposed a mining moratorium in 1982 to study the idea.

In the wake of falling uranium prices and the 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown, the mining proposal died. But Virginia’s mining moratorium remained.

Virginia Uranium wants the General Assembly to lift the moratorium. The issue was expected to be a hot one in the current session, but McDonnell’s action pushed it back to 2013.

The company wants to create the mine as well as a mill where the uranium would be separated from rock. The operation would create “yellowcake,” a sandy-looking form of uranium that would go outside Virginia for processing into fuel for nuclear power plants.

Opponents say the operation could pollute streams such as the Banister, which serves boaters and anglers and flows into the drinking-water supply of about 1 million people in Hampton Roads.

Virginia Uranium says the mine and mill would employ more than 300 people and pose minuscule risks.

At the company’s headquarters in Chatham, Wales passed around a brown, softball-size rock containing uranium. Opponents rally to slogans like “Hell no, we won’t glow,” but Wales said most people don’t realize how little risk uranium in this form poses.

“We’re fighting ‘The Simpsons,’” Wales said. “Most Americans know everything they do about the nuclear industry from Homer Simpson,” the TV cartoon character who is not above tossing a stray piece of nuclear waste out of his car and into the street.

“All things nuclear are not the same,” Wales said. “That rock sitting there in front of you is not the same as spent fuel that comes out of a reactor because, if it was, we would all have been done by now.”

The main force behind Virginia Uranium is Walter Coles Sr., 73, a former U.S. Foreign Service worker and Army officer who served two combat tours in Vietnam. A courtly man with red hair going to gray, he is the company’s president and CEO.

The mine would be on Coles Hill, his family’s longtime property and a former tobacco plantation.

Standing outside his three-story Georgian-style house built in the early 1800s, Coles said he wants the uranium operation to be not just a mine but a place where land and history are preserved.

“I’m an environmentalist, just as much as any of (the opponents) are,” Coles said, “except I don’t talk about it. I execute environmental initiatives” such as fencing his cattle out of streams and providing them water pumped into tanks by solar power.

Thirty-one Virginians were among the company’s first investors. Canadian investors hold about a 49 percent share, Coles said.

Nearly $40 million has been invested in the company, which has spent more than $20 million on land acquisitions, test borings and other expenses, the company says.

The uranium operation would occupy a small portion of the company’s 3,500-acre site.

The Banister River runs within 2 miles of the mine site. The town of Halifax lies along the river 22 miles downstream.

When you drive into Halifax from the west, you are greeted by stately homes and a handful of front-yard signs that say “No Mining.”

One of those homes belongs to Jack Dunavant Jr., a Halifax Town Council member and civil engineer who fought the uranium proposal in the 1980s and is fighting it now. His property backs up to a lake formed in the Banister.

Research shows that uranium exists along much of the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Dunavant said. If Virginia lifts the moratorium, mining could occur in places including watersheds leading to the James River and Richmond, he said. “We feel like this is a statewide issue.”

Virginia Uranium says opponents raise the specter of widespread mining to scare people into agreeing with them. A National Academy of Sciences report last month said Pittsylvania is the only economically attractive deposit in Virginia.

That’s only because other sites haven’t been sufficiently studied, Dunavant said.

In a lot of ways, the issue comes down to trust — and fear.

“We have committed to building the safest uranium mine in the world,” said Virginia Uranium’s Wales.

Dunavant’s response: “Hooey.”