Yellowcake Sucks!’s Recent Comments

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  Hi AtomicRod (makes me think you can leap tall buildings in a single bound and glow in the dark, or something), 

  I have been out to the Coles Hill estate.  Quite old, lovely, and in a bucolic setting.  Believe it or not, it was on tour during the Historic Garden Week in Virginia this past spring.  Funny thing was, there were no clothes in the closets at the manor.  I didn't look, but a very brave (okay, inquisitive) friend visited the home, too.  Seems no one really lives there.  Coles, the V, and his wife, Alice, live in the city of Danville--that'd be 30 miles away from the proposed mine site.  Uh, I mean sites.  They'll be two large mines at Coles Hill (and I mean large--as in the tailings piles, alone, will cover 55 city blocks!), the North and the South Mines.  

  Another interesting note: The heavy, heavy wrought iron fence sections that had been around the family's cemetery were stacked up against a tree.  Think they were moved there just to cut the grass and weedeat?  The word is, he, Coles, will move his relatives' remains elsewhere.  Wouldn't want the relatives to drop any lower than they already are, would we?  Do you really think, with 30 years of proposed blasting to excavate the uranium ore, the cemetery, much less the house, is going to withstand the constant vibration of mine activity and blasted flyrock?  Oh, the word is, the historic home will be dismantled and sold off.  Is this, in fact, true?  I don't know, but do you really believe Coles is going to live in a house that sits between the North and South Mines while daily blasting (to quote you: "quite careful in extracting") is ongoing at each?  For a period of 30 to 40 years?      

  
  Perhaps, you think Mr. Coles is a good steward of the land.  Forgive me, but it seems his and Virginia Uranium Inc.'s (VUI) exploratory drilling for uranium has already caused his neighbors problems with their well water.  For example, one neighbor who lives a couple of miles from Coles Hill had a pre-drill lead level of 2.0.  (Ideally, lead levels in drinking water should be 0.)  It's now up between 18.0-19.0, post-drilling.  (Forgive me, again, but I don't feel like looking up the lab value designation, but lead levels greater than 15.0 are "actionable.")  He and his wife, and many others of Coles' neighbors, are no longer drinking their well water--they have to drink store-bought water.  (BTW, I hear it's getting to be quite expensive, too.)  But, no, Coles and VUI are certain that the now-high lead levels in his neighbors' well water are not related to the exploratory drilling activity.  Seems Coles' unfortunate neighbors share the same problems with the folks at Goliad, Texas after exploratory drilling for uranium was done there.  They can't drink their water, either, for fear of getting sick.  Oh, and Coles' water is now high, so I hear, for lead, too.  But, he lives in Danville, remember?  No filling the pot with store-bought water to cook potatoes on the stove for him.

  Yes, I suppose we should build more nuclear power plants to solve this country's energy needs and to put that fancy yellowcake at Coles Hill to good use.  I understand 45 nuclear power plants would cost an estimated $810 billion dollars to build.  (Each costing somewhere between $12 to $18 billion.)  And if we started tomorrow, we could have nuke plants online in just 10 to 12 short years.  Really, no sweat, A-Rod, this country's only in the hole by $11 trillion dollars already.  What's $810 billion more? 

  I won't go into the obvious, "what are you going to do with all the highly-radioactive spent fuel rod waste" question because the the nuke plants that are supposed to be able to burn this waste have historically had problems burning the stuff!  And, I hear the nuke plants in this country aren't already set up to do this.  They'd have to be majorly modified or built anew.  Is there any truth to this? 

  And, of course, there's Yucca Mountain to hold all the waste.  All the knowing, lobbied politicians like to soothingly float that bit of information out there.  No matter that Nevadans are fighting it tooth and nail from ever opening or that the facility would quickly fill with the already-existing waste should it open tomorrow.  Oh, and I hear (within the last three weeks' worth of news) that Mr. Obama just might not use the facility after all.  We've only sunk $30 billion into the building of the facility already.  Oh, that's right, what another $30 billion, here or there, to add to the debt our children and their children will have to pay back?

  It doesn't seem to bother Walter Coles that his ancestors' homeplace, going back for generations, will become a Superfund site one day.  He's looking at a $10-billion-dollar ore deposit to make the destruction of his boyhood home a little easier to take.  Sadly, his neighbors, whose families have also lived around Coles Hill for generations, won't be so lucky.

  Well, enough.  I think my screen name says it all: Yellowcake Sucks!

   

   

      

   

   

   

   

  On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses