Saturday, November 19, 2011

SHENANDOAH PRESS COLUMN: DOWN THE YELLOW CAKE ROAD by John Flannery


A Canadian Company called Virginia Energy Resources, natch, that trades on the Toronto Venture Stock Exchange, has come to Virginia, and working with its merged partner, the Virginia Uranium Company, it’s contributing big time to our elected officials, about $100,000 so far, and lobbying them, and taking them on junkets to France (and Canada), with the stated objective of convincing them to lift the 30-year-old ban on mining uranium so that they can dig up about 119 million pounds of uranium, worth about $7 billion.
Having made a mess of the Canadian North Country, land of the Mounty and the Moose, they want to come to Virginia and mess up our backyard and perhaps compromise forever the land that we love and the health – our own – that we treasure. Perhaps they’ve come here because Canada’s provinces have cut back on uranium mining; some have even banned it because of devastation like that which uranium miners left behind in an open pit at the Key Lake Mine in Northern Saskatchewan, and the sand-like Stanrock tailings (70 million tons) at Elliot Lake.
Joseph Conrad, in “Heart of Darkness,” wrote that the “desire” of mining speculators was “[t]o tear treasure out of the bowels of the earth … with no more moral purpose at the back of it than burglars breaking into a safe.”
Canada is not the only place that’s been turned into a moonscape by such mining; we’ve done it in the United States as well. 
At a recent community briefing in Middleburg, Chris Miller, the president of the Piedmont Environmental Council (“PEC”), said, that the nation needs to move to alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power.  He said, “We don’t lack alternatives …, we lack imagination.”
At the same meeting, Jeff Painter, of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, gave a legislative prospectus on what might happen in the upcoming session of the General Assembly, how Virginia might lift the ban on uranium mining or insist that mining regulations be written effective, say in 2013, lifting the ban then.
No person on the planet can ignore that uranium made possible a nuclear weapon that was used twice against Japan, and tested for many years afterwards in the United States and off shore.
We’ve made a valiant effort to tame and harness this explosive power for safe energy production.   But achieving what is “safe” has proven elusive.  Like the sword of Damocles, the threat of nuclear power gone awry hangs over our heads by a thread.
In the first nuclear explosion in Hiroshima, Japanese soldiers looking at the nuclear bomb saw nothing as their eyes melted, running out of their sockets, blinded in the instant immediately preceding their deaths.   J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, that created the bomb, famously said, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
We had a chance to indulge this fear in the cold war when as kids we foolishly hid under our wooden school desks to protect ourselves from a nuclear bomb attack.
At the heart of this power, whether the application is to destroy humankind or produce energy, is the chain reaction among atoms of this heavy and unstable element, Uranium (named after a heavenly body, the planet Uranus, by the German scientist, M. H. Klaproth).
Walt Disney gave a demonstration of a nuclear chain reaction in the 50s.  He wiggled his cartoonish moustache, threw a ping pong ball into a room of set mousetraps, each trap holding a ping pong ball where the cheese might normally sit.  The ball struck the first trap randomly, released a 2nd ball that struck another ball, and then another; in no time, the air filled with thousands of small white balls, so densely packed as to obscure any view of Disney himself. 
This is what happens with measured and more devastating effect when neutrons bang into the nucleus of the most highly unstable isotope of Uranium.  A fire erupts, more powerful than anything the mythical Prometheus was imagined to have stolen from Zeus.
The important question is can we control this amazing chain reaction, slow it down, capture the energy, and harness it in nuclear reactors?
When the PEC’s Chris Miller spoke of mining uranium in Virginia to unearth the fuel for these reactors, he expressed concern about radioactive rivers.  Heavy rains and winds carry uranium particles that can be very damaging to human tissue. 
Miller concentrated on a site in Pittsylvania County that is at the heart of Virginia Energy Resources’ joint initiative with the Virginia Uranium Company; he also showed a map of earlier uranium mines elsewhere in Virginia that were abandoned years ago and unexplored Uranium deposits that run North and South parallel to Virginia’s western border and through Loudoun County.
The radioactive decay from uranium, which we all kind of understand intuitively, is the spontaneous breakdown of uranium’s nucleus resulting in the release of energy and matter.  The Uranium atom is so big that it is highly unstable.  It wants to be stable.  So it will decay until it changes (transmutes) into a new element that is stable. It will give off alpha and gamma rays and eventually produce (or become) Thorium. Small successive explosions produce shrapnel rays that rip at living cells, and then the cell damage is reproduced when the cells replicate.  Miller said that these rays were “bioaccumulant” and that they “affect brain, liver, heart, kidneys and other human systems.”  Gamma rays can pass through clothing and concrete and heavy metal to cause damage throughout the body, prompting radiation sickness and cancer.  Alpha rays can’t penetrate the skin but, once in the body, they damage living tissue, so you don’t want to inhale or ingest any uranium tailings or dust, no matter how small.  Miller warned that “at the cellular level, this causes huge problems.” Workers in the 1920s who licked their small thin brushes to paint radium dials on watches died because of their devotion to their work.
We measure how long it takes for half of the atoms of a given unstable mass to decay and call that number the element’s half-life.  No doubt you’ve heard that term and kind of understood what it meant.  Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.51 billion years. Remember the radium dials on watches? Radium 226 has an intermediate half-life of 1,600 years,  so those watches are a radiation source that runs long before it runs down.
The danger perceived from meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl chilled interest in nuclear reactors.  Though we have been assured that it’s safer these days, an earthquake and Tsunami recently caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan that contaminated a wide area around the plant and compromised food and water supplies as far away as Tokyo.  Closer to home, Virginia’s North Anna nuclear plant, which was built on a fault line (I kid you not), shut down after our recent earth quake; but now we’re told it’s safe to fire up again.
Miller commented how the uranium mining company seeks to reassure Virginians by saying there will be federal oversight and regulation of their mining.  But federal oversight and regulation also assured us the mines of West Virginia were safe from gas explosions (when they weren’t), and that the Gulf of Mexico was safe from any major oil drilling disaster (when it wasn’t).
It may be helpful to follow the history that brought us to this legislative juncture when we’re considering lifting the uranium mining ban.
According to Messrs. Miller and Painter, in 1981, the General Assembly directed the Virginia Coal and Energy Commission to evaluate the effects of uranium development. In 1982, the General Assembly imposed a moratorium on uranium mining until there could be regulations governing mining. In 1984, the Commission decided the moratorium could be lifted if its recommendations were accepted.
In 2007, the state granted a permit to Virginia Uranium Inc. to drill test holes for uranium. In 2008, the General Assembly proposed a bill to create the Virginia Uranium Mining Commission; the Democrats passed the bill in the Senate but the Republicans delayed consideration of the bill until 2009. In 2008, the Commission voted to create a subcommittee to study the issue of uranium mining.

In February 2010, Virginia Uranium made a grant of $1.4 million to the Commonwealth to produce a report on uranium mining by this December 1. We are now waiting to see that report, and to determine whether it’s an objective peer review policy finding or another thinly veiled political propaganda vehicle to justify the industry’s pre-ordained objective of lifting the ban.

It will be a short hop time-wise from the publication of that report on December 1 until the General Assembly meets in January, too short, Miller and Painter believe, for legislators to deliberate the matter seriously. So we’ll have to scrutinize carefully what these mining interests try to slip by in Richmond or regret at our leisure afterwards.
Rachel Carson wrote in 1962 in “Silent Spring” that “[t]he most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.  This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible.”
This legislation, if powerful vested interests overcome rational argument, is likely to release a clear and irreversible danger in Virginia – and that would be our state’s shame and disgrace.

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