You know how some early Americans thought to invade Canada. Well, they are now invading Virginia.
There’s a Canadian Company that wants Virginia 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.
You might think they feel safer mining here rather than in Canada. The truth is they’re coming here because they’ve already thoroughly messed up their own north land – such as the open pit they left behind at the Key Lake Mine in Northern Saskatchewan, and the sand-like Stanrock tailings (70 million tons) at Elliot Lake. What they leave behind looks like a moonscape – barren, lifeless and gray.
We can’t really want them to do the same to us. Instead of allowing them to lift the ban on mining uranium, we should be considering every other energy alternative before radioactive material. Some prefer nuclear because there are no carbon emissions. That’s good but don’t forget there is the radiation from uranium. Our best engineers have shown no clear ability to mine uranium safely, nor much more success in avoiding leaks from reactors when generating nuclear energy at plants, and then there is that nasty question of what we do with the spent radioactive rods and ore that sends off radiation for longer than we can imagine our progeny existing.
This Canadian company and its Virginia supporters nevertheless want our Virginia General Assembly to lift the ban on uranium mining – and the legislative outcome is in doubt.
Ordinarily, the unstable Uranium atom decays until it becomes another element that is stable. In the bargain, it sends out alpha and gamma rays. Gamma rays rip through your clothing and concrete and heavy metal and can cause radiation sickness and cancer. Once you inhale or ingest any uranium tailings or dust, no matter how small, once inside you, the alpha rays damage living tissue from within. We like to think everything wears down and Uranium does but longer than we can imagine. Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.51 billion years. Radium 226 has an intermediate half-life of 1,600 years. This is a half-life longer than all recorded or imagined time.
In order to unearth the fuel for these reactors in Virginia, among the very serious challenges to our safety and well-being, are the radioactive rivers that we shall likely unleash and the toxic dust that will float in the air that Virginians breathe because of the mining of this unstable element. Heavy rains feeding rivers and winds carrying uranium particles will damage human tissue beyond repair.
Today we are focused on a proposed mining site in Pittsylvania County, the principal object of the Canadian company’s interest, but you should be aware that there are 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 Canadian company and its Virginian supporters tell us, like that old song, of Bobby McFerrin’s, “Don’t worry. Be happy,” for there will be federal oversight and regulation of the mining. We had assurances from these same federal authorities that 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). So we are not assured.
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. Write your state delegate and senator -- so that maybe they don’t get this one wrong.
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