A Virginia Farmer Fights to Harvest His Uranium

Walter Coles Sr. stood on a hill overlooking the Virginia pasture land that his family has farmed since it was deeded to them by Thomas Jefferson, motioning with a sweep of his hand to the expanse of radioactive treasure buried below. “There’s uranium everywhere,” Coles said of fields that had once been filled with tobacco. In fact, his land holds the largest-known deposit of uranium in the U.S., an estimated 119 million pounds that could displace imports that constitute more than 90 percent of the uranium used by the nation’s nuclear power plants. But the cache, once valued at $6 billion, can’t be mined. The Virginia legislature, after the Three Mile Island nuclear power station meltdown in 1979, imposed a moratorium on mining uranium in the state. But Coles is fighting the legality of the ban through Virginia Uranium Inc., a company he formed with some Canadian investors. The case has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where arguments will be heard on Nov. 5...MORE

An unfortunate example of what has happened in the U.S. The legislature of Virginia, the home state of Thomas Jefferson, is preventing a person from using their own property.

"The right to procure property and to use it for one's own enjoyment is essential to the freedom of every person, and our other rights would mean little without these rights of property ownership."
---Thomas Jefferson