Oct 21 - The Virginian-Pilot

Coles Hill is the name of a historic farm here in Pittsylvania County, a quiet place off a dirt road with a stately brick home overlooking tangled hedge rows and rolling fields.

It also is the site of one of the largest uranium deposits in the United States, and the biggest ever discovered on the East Coast.

As much as 110 million pounds of uranium ore could lie beneath these gentle hills where cattle now graze and tobacco once reigned. The value of this radioactive deposit, based on current market prices: about $10 billion.

Walter Coles lives in the old manor atop this potential bonanza, just as his relatives have for the past 200 years. The groundwater from which he drinks is suspected of being high in radon, a potentially hazardous gas, and the bricks that make up his home register higher than normal levels of radioactivity.

"Somehow we've managed just fine these past five generations," Coles said with a wry chuckle last week during a tour of his farm in a pickup.

Along with neighbors, family and friends, Coles has formed a company, Virginia Uranium Inc., and hired geologists and professionals, who work in a small office in Chatham, the Pittsylvania County seat. They hope to persuade local, state and federal officials to allow all uranium buried beneath Coles Hill to be mined, milled and sold to nuclear power plants.

It is an enormous project full of promise and pitfalls, but one that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is at least willing to study.

In his Virginia Energy Plan released this summer, the governor suggested that, in the name of greater energy independence and cleaner-burning fuels, the Pittsylvania County option remain on the table -- at least for now.

Before any mining could occur, Virginia lawmakers would have to drop their ban on uranium extraction, imposed 25 years ago after another company attempted to tap Coles Hill.

That company, Marline Uranium Corp., backed largely by Canadian investors and chemical giant Union Carbide, eventually dropped its bid and sold its mineral leases because of fierce opposition and sagging mineral prices.

Renewed interest in mining today also faces an armada of concerned residents, environmentalists and public-health advocates.

Opponents are lining up to scrutinize the project, fearing increased cancer risks among mine workers and neighbors, diminished property values, a bad image for Southside Virginia, as well as the potential for radioactive pollution of groundwater, air quality and local streams and rivers.

"Our preference is that Virginia just stay away from all of this," said Rick Parrish, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville.

"Uranium might be stable in the ground in rock form," Parrish said, "but when you pulverize it, you open up the whole thing to all kinds of potential problems and questions."

Mike Town, state director of the Sierra Club, was more succinct.

"It's just nuts," Town said. "I mean, uranium mining? In Virginia?"

The operation would be the first commercial uranium mine east of the Mississippi River and would require construction of an industrial mill nearby.

Inside the mill, hard rock would be smashed to bits, thus freeing the coveted uranium ore, known as "yellow cake," because of its color and texture.

Sandy wastes, called "tailings," would be collected at the mill, stored on site and likely reburied. Tailings harbor some radioactivity, as well as other heavy metals, and are what environmentalists worry about most.

The yellow cake would be packed into 55-gallon drums and trucked out of Pittsylvania County, probably to Illinois and then Kentucky, where the powdery ore would be converted and enriched into nuclear fuel rods.

Such rods are the catalysts for producing energy at Virginia's two nuclear power plants, in Surry and North Anna, as well as others across the country.

As the United States grapples with global warming and its reliance on fossil fuels, nuclear power is experiencing something of a renaissance. The Bush administration is supporting the shift, offering tax incentives and fast-track licensing.

While no new commercial plant has been built in America since the 1970s, at least 29 nuclear projects have been proposed in recent years, including the prospect of constructing one new reactor, and maybe two, at the North Anna power station northwest of Richmond.

Dominion Virginia Power, the state's largest electric utility, operates the North Anna and Surry stations. Asked about possible uranium mining in the state, a corporate spokesman was ambivalent.

"We are trading in the world market for fuel and able to secure uranium at competitive prices to help keep our costs down for our customers," Jim Norvelle, a Dominion spokesman, said in a statement. "It's hard to know right now whether having a uranium mine in Virginia would be economic for us."

In recent years, Coles said he has been approached by uranium companies from Canada, Australia, France and other nations, all asking if he would sell his mineral rights. Canada and Australia are two of the world's largest producers of uranium ore, and France is a leading user of nuclear power.

Instead, Coles said, he decided to "keep this a Virginia effort" and began organizing his own mining company. A 2001 study by Virginia Tech, which confirmed that the deposit is neither moving nor leaching underground, also motivated Coles to start his own company.

Coles, who says he is "approaching my late 60s," is retired after working for years as a foreign service officer for the U.S. government.

To renew political interest in uranium, Coles got some well-connected help -- namely, from his brother-in-law, Whitt Clement, a former state delegate and Virginia transportation secretary under former Gov. Mark R. Warner.

According to state Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach, Clement asked him to include uranium mining in Wagner's 2006 energy bill. The bill at first did not mention uranium. But after hearing from Clement, whom Wagner described as an old friend and colleague, "I decided to put in an amendment," the senator said.

When the bill passed last year, a section that endorsed a study of possible uranium mining in Pittsylvania County remained in the text -- and later became part of the Virginia Energy Plan, which Kaine announced this summer.

There are two Norfolk connections to the mining project.

Coles' sister, Sarah Coles McBrayer, who lives in Norfolk, owns half of the mineral rights at the family estate. And Norfolk businessman Harvey Roberts is a member of Virginia Uranium Inc.'s board of directors, a seat that Coles McBrayer asked him to fill.

The president and CEO of Virginia Uranium Inc. is Norman Reynolds, a Canadian geologist now living in Chatham. Reynolds led efforts to mine Coles Hill in the 1980s.

In an interview last week, Reynolds recalled how prospectors first discovered uranium in Pittsylvania County more than 25 years ago.

Reynolds and others were intrigued by a long geological scar called the Chatham Fault, which extends piecemeal from Northern Virginia into North Carolina. Hired crews criss-crossed the fault line in cars, holding devices out the windows that detect radioactivity.

When driving past Coles Hill, the radiation levels "suddenly got very high," Reynolds said, "so we stopped and started looking around." They found rocks in roadside ditches that, when measured, also shot readings off the chart.

"We knew we'd found a winner," he said.

Uranium mining in the United States has been conducted almost exclusively in dry, Western states. Today, the focus is mostly in Wyoming, Texas, Utah and Nebraska, industry officials said.

The industry's early history, dating to the 1950s, is disastrous, filled with horror stories about sickened workers, homes built from uranium tailings that led to cancer deaths, and failing lagoons that leaked radioactive wastes into public waterways.

Coles and others insist that those bad days are long gone and that the industry has become smarter and safer with advances in environmental technology and worker safety.

While acknowledging advancements, critics say Coles is missing a crucial point -- that the East Coast is vastly different from the West, from the weather to the natural environment, and that mining here is untested and too risky.

"Uranium never has been mined in such a densely populated area like this," said Eloise Nenon, who helped to organize the group Southside Concerned Citizens 25 years ago and is helping to jump-start the group now.

"The water table is higher here," Nenon said. "It's wetter, more humid. The trucks they use are enormous, and where are we going to put them? The risks of radiation and water pollution could be catastrophic. "

Coles dismissed such criticisms as "old news, based on old data." He said he only wants to proceed with mining if a panel of experts conducts a study and determines that it can be done safely.

He hopes the Virginia General Assembly will approve of such a study when it convenes in January.

If researchers conclude that mining would be safe and would not adversely harm the environment, Coles then wants lawmakers to start drafting uranium regulations and standards, and eventually drop the state moratorium.

On this timetable, Coles said Virginia could be extracting uranium within the next six or seven years.

"I could have sold out and moved to Florida," Coles said, "but I'm staying here. I'd live right here with the mine just down the road. I want to make this happen."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340,

scott.harper@pilotonline.com

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