Pittsylvania County tables megapark mining issue
CHATHAM — A proposal by a Pittsylvania County resident to prohibit uranium mining at the Berry Hill Road industrial megapark site has hit a dead end.
The Board of Supervisors voted to table the idea during its adjourned meeting Tuesday night, but not before Staunton River Supervisor Marshall Ecker urged the board to pass the resolution to protect county taxpayers’ investment.
“I believe that this board should step up to the plate,” Ecker said.
Dan River Supervisor James Snead made a substitute motion to table the matter and the board, by a narrow 4-3 vote, passed it. Snead, Tunstall Supervisor Tim Barber, Banister Supervisor William Pritchett and Westover Supervisor and Board Chairman Coy Harville voted in favor. Ecker, Chatham-Blairs Supervisor Hank Davis and Callands-Gretna Supervisor Fred Ingram opposed Snead’s motion.
Karen Maute, a uranium mining opponent, asked the board last month to ban uranium mining within a 25-mile radius of the proposed industrial megapark site. Maute also wants Danville City Council and the Danville Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facilities Authority to sign the resolution.
Snead said he proposed the substitute motion because the park belongs to RIFA.
“I think it (the resolution) needs to come from the RIFA board,” Snead said after the meeting.
Maute proposed the resolution because the 3,700-acre megapark site includes historic Marline mineral leases. Marline Corp. had plans to mine and mill uranium in Pittsylvania County in the early 1980s.
Maute expressed consternation during an interview after the vote.
“If they’re not going to pass a resolution to protect the megapark, what are their plans for the park?” she said.
Maute’s resolution points to at least one former Marline parcel covering 504 acres. RIFA owns the leases.
Harville said last month that RIFA purchased the property with the condition that the previous owner could not have the mineral rights to the leases. RIFA has no intention of mining uranium at the Berry Hill megapark site, Harville said.
City and county officials hope to attract a major manufacturer to the park site. County Administrator Dan Sleeper said installation of roads, utilities, erosion control, grading and making the site into a park will cost $222 million.
In other matters, the board voted to schedule a public hearing on a proposed policy to authorize the transfer of animals from the county animal control facility to licensed agencies inspected by the state veterinarian.
The board also voted 6-1 to request that county departments propose 10-percent lower budgets for the 2010-11 fiscal year than those for 2009-10. Harville opposed because the reduction may need to be higher, he said.
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The cut and paste crowd is active tonite! Stop quoting zll your BS brochures and stick to the subject, Use some intelligent conversation instead of regurgetating anti-uranium pamphlets.
I wonder if they need me to come to work yet. I am not scare. If more people worked, then we wouldn’t have os much crime around here. I am serious when I say that I don’t Let’s go to work!
The impact of mining and processing uranium for nuclear power plants involves huge impacts on humans and the environment. With mines mostly in Australia, the American west, Canada, and central and southern Africa, atomic power has created huge ecological crises whose solutions are a long way off and are already proving to be exceedingly expensive.
When uranium ore is gouged out the ground, it emits radon gas that fills mine shafts with deadly fumes. Uranium miners throughout the world have historically suffered from abnormally high lung cancer rates. They also die in the same kinds of accidents that kill coal and other ore miners.
When the raw uranium is brought to the surface, it’s milled into fine sands called tailings. Billions of tons of these waste granules are dumped near milling plants throughout the world, emitting huge quantities of radioactive radon gas, a well-known cause of lung cancer. Radon emissions from mills in Colorado and New Mexico have been tracked as far away as New York City and Washington DC. They are the number one source of increased background radiation from the atomic fuel cycle.
Alongside the mills are huge ponds of acid solutions used to separate the usable uranium isotopes from the waste. These ponds are extremely lethal to human beings and poisonous to the environment. Periodically the dams holding them back break, wrecking ghastly havoc on the regions downstream.
The percentage of uranium usable for fuel is less than 5% of the total ore dug out of the ground. Those rare isotopes must then be enriched in giant factories that are extremely inefficient. The dominant process actually coverts the solid ore into a gas (uranium hexafluoride), and then back to solids. The plants consume huge quantities of energy, most of it now generated by fossil fuels.
The biggest enrichment plant in the US, at Paducah, Kentucky, is powered by two huge coal plants. Though the nuke reactor industry claims to generate about 18% of the nation’s electricity, some 3% of the nation’s electricity is used to refine uranium for those power plants.
At every stage of the mining, milling and enrichment process, significant quantities of fossil fuel-generated greenhouse gases are poured into the atmosphere. The idea that the nuclear fuel cycle “creates no greenhouse gas emissions” is a deliberately and dangerously misleading myth.
The spent fuel rods from atomic reactors remain intensely radioactive for centuries, and are among the most lethal industrial objects ever created by human beings. Standing within a few feet of a single rod can result in death in less than five minutes.
In recent years the nuke power industry has tried to revive the myth of reprocessing, by which spent fuel can be re-formed into usable fuel. The technology has been tried in a number of nations, including the US. But it is prohibitively expensive, and makes no economic sense. It also generates substantial new quantities of intensely radioactive waste for which no long-term disposal methods have been discovered.
Reprocessing also creates large quantities of weapons-grade plutonium, the material used to build the Bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. Making more plutonium under any circumstances threatens the world with the production of still more atomic weapons. India, Pakistan, South Africa and Israel, along with numerous other countries, are known to have fashioned nuclear weapons from uranium extracted from ostensibly civilian nuclear power programs. Recently the United States has threatened war with Iran on the presumption that the civilian enrichment process would give them the fissionable materials needed to build their own atomic weapons.
From start to finish, from mining, milling, enrichment, fissioning and waste disposal to the failed re-use of radioactive fuel, the nuclear fuel cycle has proven catastrophic for human and ecological health, for the economy, and for the proliferation of atomic weapons.
But no radioactive windmill wastes will ever be used to destroy a city. Solar panels will not emit cancer-causing radon gas.
URANIUM INDUSTRY:
OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURES
Delay of hazard recognition and consequent worker non-protection is an unfortunate but recurring theme in the regulatory and uranium industry history:
•Radon daughter radiation is a health hazard to workers in advanced stages of exploration, such as in tunnels and shafts, where very high levels of 1.6 working levels (WL) have been recorded in low grade deposits (1600 times normal background levels).
•Average radon daughter levels in underground mines range from 0.1 WL to about 1 WL (that is, 100 to 1000 times normal background levels).
•In open-pit mines, the high density of radon (7.8 times heavier than air) and atmospheric inversion conditions can cause levels of from 2 to 10 WL in moderate to high grade ore bodies.
•Workers in open pits with low to moderate grade ore receive 2 to 4 times the normal lifetime dose of radon daughter radiation during their employment life, under conditions where there are no inversions.
•In a uranium mill, with low to moderate grade ore, the millers receive from 5 to 14 times the normal background lifetime dose of radon daughter radiation during their 30-year working lives.
•Uranium millers may receive doses of gamma radiation 1000 times background from high grade ores.
•Although it is assumed workers are receiving only a small fraction of the annual limits, this is not borne out by the facts.
•Despite claims to the contrary, the risks from radiation in uranium mining far exceed those of a “safe” industry.
•Uranium industry proponents have tended to minimize risk through lack of knowledge, generalizations, quoting outdated studies, dilution of risk estimates, unsubstantiated arguments, personal bias, basing conclusions on inadequate studies, doublethink, and assuming workers cannot absorb the full truth.
Last I heard, no nuclear reactor facility if proposed for Coles hill. So no danger of a meltdown. That is scare tactits tossed out there by desperate people.
To the operators of the future facility at coles hill, call me. I have been drinking poisoned water containing Goodyears chemicals for over 12 years now. My health is already surely damaged. (Thanks to GTR and FPC) I will work in the uranium mine. Will start tomorrow, call me. I am in the Danville phone book, easy to find. Let’s go to work!
ooooooooooowwwwwww!
Stop the BS. You’re so excitable. You’re into the ALL CAPS thing now. oooooooowwwwwww! I guess that means I should reconsider my position. NOT!
Throughout your all caps bloviating here, as well as through your most recent posts, you have failed miserably to do something that is absolutely critical to your position prevailing in this debate. You have repeatedly, and unwisely, refused to STAY ON POINT YOU IDIOT!!!! See there, you’re not the only one who can type in all caps.
The point is, can uranium be mined safely at Coles Hills. That’s it. Nothing further needs to be discussed. Let’s just assume that you’re right (no, you’re not of course; but, play along for a round or two). Let’s just say that nuclear power is dirtier and more polluting than coal. Or maybe, and I’m stretching here, but just assume that nuclear power is more harmful than an imaginary power plant fueld by burning wood. Making all these false assumptions and pretending they are real, here comes the $64,000 question: So What? So what? That has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with whether or not uranium can be mined safely at Coles Hills. If it can, mine it. The sooner the better. If it can’t, fine, leave it in the ground. Why are you so opposed to that simple decision (whether or not it can be mined safely) driving this train?
I mean, come on, you’re acting like they want to build a nuclear power plant outside Chatham. I wish they would. Think about the employment opportunities. But that’s not the concern. That’s not the issue.
Over the past months, I have enjoyed the wide range of comments concerning money, salaries and the future of the Dan River Region as it applies to uranium mining. It is a known fact that, in Danville, the success of a person is measured in money. Whenever someone’s perceived wealth or salary exceeds the “norm” for Danville they are considered to be money hungry. They refuse to fit the conservative mold that Southside Virginia prides itself on.
The closed minded here believe people should only make a predetermined amount “to live within their means.“
People are passing judgment on uranium mining firms, several other successful investors and feel that these people are just here to drain our precious resources and lay waste to Pittsylvania County.
With the financial resources of investors our region now has the opportunity to thrive and flourish.
Folks that is the way it is. Many residents in Southside Virginia can be fortunate to be rewarded successful jobs then became successful citizens with a permanent job.
They will not be adding to the current plethora of government subsidized families. The future of our nation is based on achievement. Those graduates that wish to achieve success currently avoid Danville. The salaries and jobs are limited and benefits are few. If Danville plans to drop the “failed 1950’s lifestyle” , future employees need to see promise here, not bickering over investing in our economy.
When or if a national corporation plans to make an enormous investment in Dan Reiver Region those trying to “police morality “ and inhibit achievement will need to be placed on the curb on trash day.
SAMUEL S. EPSTEIN, M.D. IS PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND OCCUPATIONAL MEDICINE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH; CHAIRMAN OF THE CANCER PREVENTION COALITION; AND AUTHOR OF OVER 200 SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES AND 15 BOOKS ON CANCER, INCLUDING THE GROUNDBREAKING BOOK, “THE POLITICS OF CANCER” AND THE 2009 BOOK, “TOXIC BEAUTY”.
A NOVEMBER 2007 ARTICLE ON U.S. CHILD LEUKEMIA DEATHS UPDATED THE 1990 NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE STUDY AND SHOWED LOCAL RATES ROSE AS NUCLEAR PLANTS AGED—EXCEPT NEAR PLANTS THAT SHUT DOWN.
IN MAY THIS YEAR, THE U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (NRC) QUIETLY ANNOUNCED IT WAS COMMISSIONING AN UPDATE OF THE 1990 NATIONAL CANCER STUDY. THIS SOUNDS LIKE A POSITIVE STEP. HOWEVER, THE NRC HAS LONG BEEN A HARSH CRITIC OF ANY SUGGESTION THAT REACTORS CAUSE CANCER. THIS IS NOT SURPRISING, SINCE THE COMMISSION RECEIVES 90% OF ITS FUNDS FROM NUCLEAR COMPANIES THAT OPERATE REACTORS.
RATHER THAN ASK FOR COMPETITIVE BIDS FOR THE CANCER STUDY, THE NRC SIMPLY HANDED THE JOB TO THE OAK RIDGE INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. OAK RIDGE IS AN ENERGY DEPARTMENT CONTRACTOR IN THE CITY THAT HAS OPERATED A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PLANT FOR OVER HALF A CENTURY. IT IS ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS RADIOACTIVE POLLUTERS IN THE COUNTRY. THE “INSTITUTE” IS MERELY A FRONT LINE SHILL FOR PRO-NUCLEAR FORCES. IT HAS NO RECORD OF PUBLISHING SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES ON CANCER RATES NEAR REACTORS. THE WHITEWASH IS ON. SOUNDS EXACTLY HOW OUR CORRUPT POLITICIANS ARE FRAMING THE URANIUM DEBATE!
Joseph Mangano, MPH, MBA, Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, has authored 23 scientific articles since the mid-1990s documenting high local cancer rates near nukes. One study showed child cancer exceeded the national rate near 14 of 14 plants in the eastern U.S. Another showed that when U.S. nuclear plants closed, local infant deaths and child cancer cases plunged immediately after shutdown. Other publications by Mangano have shown rising levels of radioactive Strontium-90, emitted by reactors, in baby teeth of children living near reactors, which were closely linked with trends in childhood cancer rates. The young aren’t the only ones affected by reactor emissions. NEW EVIDENCE HAS EXAMINED ADULT RATES OF THYROID CANCER, A DISEASE ESPECIALLY SENSITIVE TO RADIATION. THYROID IS THE FASTEST-RISING CANCER IN THE U.S., NEARLY TRIPLING SINCE 1980. THIS EVIDENCE PROVES THAT MOST U.S. COUNTIES WITH THE HIGHEST THYROID CANCER RATES ARE WITHIN A 90-MILE RADIUS COVERING EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA, NEW JERSEY, AND SOUTHERN NEW YORK. THIS AREA HAS 16 NUCLEAR REACTORS (13 STILL IN OPERATION) AT 7 PLANTS, THE DENSEST CONCENTRATION OF REACTORS IN THE U.S.
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