This episode of Lightly on the Ground Radio features a parlor conversation among several who spoke at 53rd Garden Club of Virginia Conservation Public Education Forum entitled Uranium: What Should Virginia Do? The focus is on an effort to rescind the 1982 ban on uranium mining.
We discuss several discrepancies between fact and the talking points being used to promote the safety of mining uranium in a major watershed. Topics include the effect on the Commonwealth’s two major industries: agriculture and tourism; the difficulty in predicting the behavior of radioactive tailings stored in robust plastic bags for thousands of years; and the cost of reclamation and restoration which would, very probably, revert to the state and federal governments, that is to taxpayers. Olga Kolutushkina,(legislative and regulatory adviser to the Roanoke River Basin Association), Robert E. Moran, Ph.D. (geologist, geochemist and partner in Michael-Moran Assoc., LLC, in Golden, CO), and Paul Robinson, (Research Director for Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, NM) joined Sunny Gardener for a candid discussion of that forum which just ended in the parlor of the Jepson Center at University of Richmond.