2nd Commission study explores economic impact of Virginia uranium mining
With the National Academy of Sciences study of the health and environmental impacts of Virginia uranium mining set to get underway this summer, the Uranium Mining Subcommitte of the Virginia Coal & Energy Commission is now turning its attention to a second study that will examine the economic impact in the region and across the Commonwealth.
The Subcommittee convened a public meeting in Chatham on Tuesday evening to hear from members of the community about what should be included in the scope of the socioeconomic study. About 300 people attended the meeting, including proponents and opponents of uranium mining, as well as some who hadn’t formulated an opinion and who were awaiting the results of the socioeconomic and National Academy studies before making up their minds. The Subcommittee hopes to finalize the scope and issue a solicitation for proposals from academic and research institutions to conduct the study in the next month.
Pittsylvania County, where Chatham is located, is home to the largest untapped uranium deposit in the United States. The deposit, known as Coles Hill, contains enough uranium to fuel Virginia’s entire nuclear power demand for more than 70 years. Virginia gets roughly 40% of its electricity from four nuclear reactors. Before the site can be mined or milled for nuclear fuel, the Virginia General Assembly would have to lift its 25-year-old moratorium on uranium mining.
As a starting point for the socioeconomic study, the Uranium Mining Subcommittee’s chairman, Delegate Lee Ware, asked Virginia Uranium Inc. – the locally-owned and operated company that controls the Coles Hill deposit – to prepare an economic scoping study specifying the amount of jobs, revenue, local taxes, salaries, local service contracts and other economic impacts the Coles Hill project would generate in the region. Lyntek Inc., the Colorado-based engineering and feasibilty studies firm that conducted the economic scoping study, released the results last week.
The scoping study predicted a signifcant economic boom for the region from the development of Coles Hill, including 350 temporary construction jobs, 300-350 permanent jobs with salaries ranging from $35,000 to $250,000 and $20-$30 million in local services and supplies purchased each year from local vendors.
Several speakers at last week’s public meeting spoke about the desperate need for a project like Coles Hill to reignite the sluggish economy that has deteriorated almost unabated across Southside Virginia over the last couple decades. The decline of the once tobacco-dominated agricultural economy and the shuttering of booming manufacturing and furniture industries have scarred the region with chronically high unemployment – one in every six workers is out of a job – and brutally depressed wages – the average worker earns roughly half of what workers earn in the rest of the state.
Others lamented that Southside is losing so many of the most talented, highly-skilled and ambitious young college graduates that come from the region because of the abject lack of job opportunities. An esteemed professor from Virginia Tech and a geologist and director from the Virginia Museum of Natural History both spoke about the enormous potential for the Coles Hill project to deliver a viable economic future for the upcoming generation of scientists and engineers coming out of Virginia Tech and other regional universities and community colleges.
The president of the local NAACP and several other speakers urged the Subcommittee to focus on the impact that millions of dollars of annual tax revenue from the Coles Hill project will have on the area’s public schools and other locally-funded public services.
Some speakers urged the Subcommittee to explore the impact that the perception of uranium mining could have on the region’s ability to attract new businesses and faculty and students for private schools like Chatham Hall and Hargrave Academy. The Subcommittee’s study will also likely address how perceptions of uranium mining could affect the marketability of agricultural products from the region.
The Subcommittee will finalize the scope of its socioeconomic study this summer and have slated its completion for around the same time as the National Academy of Sciences study, in the fall of 2011.
