The Japanese nuclear disaster. Italy, Switzerland and Germany retreat on atomic power. Closer to home, a tornado knocks out a Dominion nuclear generator in Surry County. The French delay construction of a nuclear-components factory in Newport News.
Those headlines — not to mention fallout from an all-expense-paid field trip for more than a dozen Virginia legislators to a former uranium mine in France — aren't helping the company that wants to extract a giant lode of uranium in verdant Pittsylvania County.
But that bad news isn't scaring off deep-pocketed Virginia investors. More than 20 high net-worth individuals — people "who would be known to the General Assembly," says the Richmond financier who helped enlist them — are committing nearly $2.4 million to the not-so-little-mine that could make some of them even richer.
This is a new front in the debate over lifting Virginia's 29-year ban on uranium mining. It adds to the ranks of proponents the kind of people who could make the business-of-Virginia-is-business argument that aim-to-please legislators take to like cats to cream.
Buford Scott, whose old-line firm recruited investors for Virginia Uranium Inc. from a pool of 60 prospects, said they've been asked to put their mouths where their money is — to be "willing to speak up" for the company. He and Virginia Uranium declined to identify investors. The minimum investment was $25,000.
Scott's shop, Scott & Stringfellow, could help Virginia Uranium look more like what mining foes claim it isn't: a Virginia company — even with Pittsylvania property owners, notably front man Walter Coles Sr., opening their ancestral lands and wallets.
"That's definitely been a goal of my father's," said son Walter Coles Jr. "Nothing would make him happier to have the company owned and supported by as many Virginians as possible."
If the moratorium is lifted and market conditions improve, including China's promised expansion in nuclear energy, Virginia Uranium plans an IPO.
Virginia Uranium absorbed a Canadian firm, creating a public company that's listed on the Toronto exchange and currently trades at about 18 cents a share. It peaked at 78 cents. But like many nuclear-related equities, it has been caught in the downdraft that is the catastrophe in Japan.
In Virginia, obstacles are still piling up: A coalition of environmental groups and localities worry that mining could poison the water supply for the state's southern tier. North Carolina is nervous.
But political currents are changing. The retirement of Del. Watkins Abbitt Jr., a mining foe, means the opposition is losing a cagey operator. A Republican take-back of the Senate could only help. And if Gov. Bob McDonnell can't see oil derricks go up in his old backyard of Virginia Beach, he'd probably settle for a uranium mine in someone else's.
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