The Coles Hill Farm uranium deposit in Pittsylvania County has been a bone of contention since the 1970s when geologists discovered it. From the property owners to one mining company after another, extraction of uranium ore has been an ongoing issue. Likewise, the possibility of mining the deposit has met vehement opposition from environmental advocates and the majority of local residents. For decades, too, uranium mining has been an undercurrent in Southside Virginia politics.
It’s about to get much more contentious very quickly.
That’s because Canadian-backed Virginia Uranium Inc. (VUI) and its local and international investors have taken their fight to overturn the commonwealth’s 36-year-old mining moratorium to U.S. Supreme Court. It has just scheduled arguments for Nov. 5, and the stakes for Virginia couldn’t be higher.
The first fight over mining took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Marline Inc. sought to mine the 119-million-ton deposit. Residents and environmentalists rose up in alarm and protest. The mine Marline was proposing to open was an open-air facility, and there was no safety or environmental track record of such a facility in a climate zone as Virginia’s, technically a “humid sub-tropical” zone with an annual average precipitation of 43.37 inches. The danger to ground water, underground aquifers and the many rivers, streams and lakes was just too great.
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Finally, in 1982, the General Assembly, led by state Sen. Howard P. Anderson of neighboring Halifax County, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, and other Southside legislators, enacted a moratorium on uranium mining that only the legislature itself could lift.
It’s that moratorium that VUI and its attorneys seek to overturn. Their argument, rejected at various levels of federal courts in the Richmond-based Fourth Circuit since the suit was initially filed in 2015, is that the Virginia moratorium violates the federal Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (an amendment of the 1946 act) and the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Atomic Energy Act, passed at the height of the Cold War, is “the fundamental U.S. law on both the civilian and military uses of nuclear materials.” According to the NRC, it serves as the legal foundation for the development, regulation and disposal of nuclear materials and facilities in the U.S.
That is the basis for VUI’s lawsuit: a novel, untested legal theory that “development, regulation and disposal of nuclear materials and facilities” includes mining, processing and enrichment of uranium deposits. It should be noted that nowhere in either the 1946 or 1954 acts are mining, extracting, milling, enrichment and tailings management mentioned.
Lining up behind VUI with “friend of the court” briefs is a panoply of industry groups and politicians: the United States Chamber of Commerce, nuclear industry lobbying groups and a trio of conservative Republican U.S. senators — Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. Most importantly, the Trump administration has weighed in with a brief supporting VUI.
Opposing VUI’s efforts are the attorneys general of 10 states — Indiana, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas. Also opposing are major environmental groups including the Dan River Basin Association, the Roanoke River Basin Association and the Piedmont Environmental Law Center Other opponents include national state-and-local government associations and a bipartisan group of legislators and business groups from the region.
We have supported Virginia’s uranium moratorium and the decision of the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors not to allow mining, deeming such decisions to be properly in the purview of state and local governments, not the federal government. One session after another of the General Assembly and one governor after another over three and a half decades have favored keeping the moratorium in place, in addition to believing whether to lift it or not is a decision for the residents of Virginia and their elected representatives.
Indeed, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, in one ruling after another, has attempted to revive the notion of federalism — the sovereign states are the equal partners of the central government — which would form the foundation of the belief that such decisions are properly made by the states. And under the principle of originalism that guides the court’s conservative majority, the 1954 law makes no mention whatsoever of mining and enrichment of the raw materials.
The Three Mile Island nuclear plant meltdown in March 1979 dealt a near-fatal blow to the nuclear power industry, and it was decades before it recovered. After experiencing a brief renaissance in the early 2000s, the Great Recession and the Fukushima disaster in 2011 dealt additional blows to the future of nuclear power. Skyrocketing costs of nuclear plant construction have all but brought the industry to a halt because customers would revolt at the high bills they would face to pay for these plants. And in the meantime, the costs of renewable energy have plummeted, decimating the market for enriched uranium.
We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again: Whether to allow mining or not, from the beginning, is a decision that should be reserved for Virginians and their elected representatives to make, not the federal government. We hope the Supreme Court justices concur.