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The civil rights organization said the resolution is rooted in fears that poor and minority communities would be disproportionately affected if an accident occurred in mining the Southside Virginia deposit.

“This is a human right. The NAACP is about human rights and environmental justice,” said Naomi Hodge-Muse, president of the Martinsville-Henry County NAACP and sponsor of the resolution.

The NAACP’s state conference unanimously approved the resolution at its meeting Sunday in Richmond.

Virginia Uranium Inc. is proposing to mine the 119-million-pound deposit in Pittsylvania County near the North Carolina line. It is believed to be the largest known deposit in the U.S. and the seventh-largest in the world.

Virginia has had a moratorium on uranium mining since 1982, when the General Assembly first took up the debate over allowing uranium mining in the state. The accident at Three Mile Island several years earlier dampened enthusiasm for nuclear power and yellowcake, the leached powder from the ore that fuels nuclear power plants.

The National Academies of Science is expected to release a study in December on the impact of uranium mining statewide. While it will not recommend whether Virginia should end the ban, the General Assembly is expected to rely heavily on the report’s contents in deciding whether to take up the issue in 2012…..

The Sierra Club and the NAACP said the economic boost mining would deliver overshadows its potential environmental impact.

“They want good quality jobs and they see a uranium mine as a deterrent to economic development,” said Mary Rafferty, an organizer for the Sierra Club.

Hodge-Muse said African-American unemployment ranges from 12 percent to 22 percent in Danville and Martinsville, the two largest cities in Southside Virginia. Still, she said, the mining jobs are not the answer.

“There is no amount of money that is worth the price of your children,” she said.

Muse-Hodge cited a study by Virginia Beach that concluded that catastrophic flooding near the mine or the area where waste would be stored could release radioactive contaminants into tributaries that feed Lake Gaston, a source of drinking water that supplies the resort city and several other Hampton Roads municipalities…..

The Sierra Club said the NAACP is among 70 organizations and localities that want the ban to remain in place.

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/54295–naacp-keep-va-ban-on-uranium-mining