The anti-nuclear party had a field day with the National Research Council’s December report on uranium mining in Virginia—and the media predictably parroted every distortion as proof that uranium mining “is dangerous.” FCW actually read the report and spoke with the Council panel chairman about public reaction to it. Bottom line? By not comprehensively presenting current day realities of hard-rock mining the panel has miseducated the public.

A new study of potential health and environmental effects of uranium mining that a National Research Council panel put out in December was more or less a gift to opponents of uranium mining in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

But nothing could be farther from the intention of the panel, according to its chairman, Dr. Paul Locke, associate professor of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. In a conversation last week about the negative spin the panel’s report had received from mining opponents and media, Locke told FCW that if it was being read as an antimining tract, “then the report’s message did not come through.”

Indeed, antimining and antinuclear groups are now promoting the study as validation of their most irrational fears about uranium mining. Since the panel made its conclusions public, namely that Virginia faced “steep hurdles” in establishing a robust regulatory system for uranium mining capable of protecting public health and the environment, hostility toward the prospect of allowing uranium to be mined in the state has intensified noticeably. 

The news media similarly understand the report as warning that uranium mining cannot be achieved safely in Virginia. Editors, reporters, broadcasters and columnists have quickly become the antimining groups’ echo chamber. They repeatedly cite the panel report in casting Virginia Uranium as an evil corporate Goliath, bent on manipulating state legislators in order to achieve its goal of generating profit at the expense of the environment and health of the public.

The truth is, several families in the region started Virginia Uranium under the leadership of a longtime landowner, Walter Coles Sr., in hopes of creating enough local well-paid jobs that their kids wouldn’t have to move away to find work.

Another key point of attack from the antimining contingent is that the group went to Canada to raise funds. There is nothing unusual about that. Unlike in the U.S., Canada’s financial industry is familiar and comfortable with resource ventures because the resources industry is the backbone of the Canadian economy. Practically every miner in the world goes to Canada in search of funding sooner or later.

Erstwhile Study Opponents Jumping for Joy
Ironically, some of the groups now trumpeting the study on their websites and in public announcements had originally denounced the initiative to perform the study in the first place. They even tried to shape the panel itself, pressuring the National Research Council (the research arm of the National Academies of Science) to remove members who had any connection to the uranium-mining industry. Anyone with expertise in the field of uranium mining, in other words, should not be allowed to participate. 

Before it was even performed opponents had also dismissed the effort because Virginia Uranium funded it to the tune of $1.4 million, in an apparently misplaced effort to educate the public. Jack Dunavent, chairman of the Southside Concerned Citizens, (now renamed “We the People of Virginia”) told FCW in March 2010 that he saw “no benefit” in the study and insisted that the support from the mining company would “taint the results.”

They are plenty pleased with it now.

Accidental Moratorium
More than two years ago the Virginia Coal and Energy Commission asked the National Research Council to convene a panel to study uranium mining in the state.

This was in response to a proposal by Virginia Uranium, which formed in 2007, to mine a uranium ore body discovered in 1978 on the property of the Coles family near the town of Chatham in southern Virginia. With 119 million pounds of contained U3O8, the deposit would generate about $6 billion over 35 years at $50 per pound U3O8.

First, however, Virginia lawmakers would have to rescind a moratorium the General Assembly had placed on uranium mining in 1982. Then, as now, the legislators wanted to study whether uranium could be safely mined in the state before deciding whether to set up a regulatory regime for it, so imposed a temporary moratorium. But then the uranium market took a dive and uranium miners all over the U.S. went out of business. The study effort was dropped—but the moratorium has remained in place ever since.

Virginia is certainly no stranger to mining, with a chunk of the Appalachian Coal Basin in its southwestern counties. The Commonwealth has a well-developed mining workforce and an experienced hard-rock mining regulatory system.

Will Study Ensure ‘Permanent’ Moratorium?
So what happened here? Did the panel indeed produce a report that fairly represented the facts in regard to the potential impacts of uranium mining in Virginia?

We do not think so. But let’s be clear: we have no reason to suspect that the 14-member panel had any agenda to tilt their report against mining in Virginia. The group did take its task seriously and did its best to fulfill it.

It is clear that the panel had a couple of things working against it. One key factor was that its study charter was extremely limited. As the panel itself stated in the non-technical summary of the study:

“The report does not focus on … the relative risks of uranium mining compared with the mining and processing of other fuels, for example coal. The committee was also not asked to make any recommendations about whether or not uranium mining should be permitted in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

In not allowing discussion of such things as the comparison of uranium mining with coal mining, the study charter made it impossible for the panel to discuss how the Commonwealth could apply its mining regulation system to hard-rock uranium mining. The panel was also unable to discuss the particulars of the Cole Hills site, which, as any miner would tell you, simply cannot be ignored in any informed discussion of the project.

We know that several antimining activist groups were aggressively involved in setting the terms of the study from the very first public meeting, as shown, for example, in the summary of a Nov. 6, 2008 meeting of the Coal and Energy Commission at which the topic of uranium mining was first introduced. It appears likely that they were successful in shaping the study to produce the results they favored. Few if any pro-mining counterparts (except for Virginia Uranium representatives) made such sustained and consistent efforts to present their perspective in public discussions.

Communications Cluelessness to Cost Virginians
A more subtle factor affecting what the panel produced, in our view, is something we see again and again in the nuclear industry and among scientists in general: the invariable cluelessness and discomfort with which scientists address highly politicized public-policy questions.

What the antimining activists have most abused in the report was its numbing compilation of the health effects of old mines—and the panel’s presentation of them as if they were real and present dangers that could be repeated in North American mines today. The antimining contingent and its allies in the press have been quick to hammer on this distortion of the reality.

Pressed on why the panel felt it necessary to devote huge portions of the report to the frightening details of the inadequate radiation protection and remediation procedures used in unregulated uranium mines that closed in the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Locke stressed that the panel had encountered a “vast literature” that scientists had generated about the health and environmental effects of old mines. The panel felt it was obligated to “summarize the literature in an honest way,” he told FCW. 

The key word here is “honest.” In a scientific debate a presentation is not “honest” if it is incomplete. 

But in the public policy arena, what is important is information that is relevant to the deliberations of decision makers. Certainly no one wants dishonesty. But an exhaustive recounting of everything that went wrong in past experience without equal discussion of all that has been done to address those pitfalls is not helpful, and in fact clouds the discussion.

That is what this report has done. And at this point it looks like Virginians ultimately will pay the price.