Deep below pastoral Coles Hill in Pittsylvania County, Va., about an hour or so north of Durham, are two huge lobes of something you don’t associate with the eastern United States: uranium.

In fact, an estimated $7 billion worth of uranium, the largest deposit in this country and perhaps the seventh largest on the planet.

This month, the divisive issue of whether to mine the mildly radioactive ore or let it remain fallow under a 1982 moratorium could be decided by the Virginia General Assembly. Whatever happens in Richmond, the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors recently made its position clear in a 5-1 nonbinding resolution: No.

Uranium mining east of the Mississippi River is such an unfamiliar and unsettling prospect – unlike the Rocky Mountain West – that it comes across as almost preposterous. Of all places, Virginia?

Well, better the Old Dominion than the Old North State, some might say. It’s not something we will have to contend with here, because North Carolina doesn’t have enough concentrated uranium to mine.

Really, you might ask, is uranium mining in Virginia something we ought to blow smoke about? After all, the Cole family promises to extract the ore using the latest, safest methods developed in northwest Canada’s uranium mines.

Moreover, the mining would be underground and tailings (waste rock) would be sealed in below-ground pits, one of the 35-year project’s many trumpeted environmental safeguards.

However, it’s not the mining that worries many people, but the milling. Uranium doesn’t occur alone. It must be separated from its host rock with mechanical and chemical means, producing an eponymous substance called yellowcake. From this begins the enrichment process that turns out the fuel for nuclear power plants.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the boom years when uranium exploration and mining were virtually avocational in the West, highly enriched uranium and its offspring plutonium went into tens of thousands of American and Russian nuclear weapons.

Few Americans know that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, huge numbers of decommissioned warheads were brought to the United States for use in our nuclear power plants. Many decommissioned U.S. warheads also meet the same end.

Thanks to these old warheads, as well as to domestic mining and imports from Canada and Australia, this country isn’t running out of uranium. But tell that to people hungry for the 325 jobs that the Coles Hill mine could bring to Southside Virginia. For them and the jobs and tax revenues that the mine promises, they say, bring it on.

Pittsylvania County thus finds itself with an agonizing dilemma: jobs – in effect, found money – vs. people of all stripes worried about radioactive contamination.

This is where Durham city and county come into the picture. Kerr and Gaston lakes receive their waters from Southside Virginia uplands, Pittsylvania County among them. Unlike the dry West, this is wet country, subject to everything from frog stranglers to hurricanes.

Someday, Durham, Raleigh and other Research Triangle cities will need water from the lakes. At least 18 North Carolina cities and counties along the Virginia border oppose the Coles Hill mine.

Ordinarily, this would be Virginia’s dogfight and none of our own. But the shared resource of water gives us a stake in the outcome. Don’t you think so too, City Council and County Commissioners?

Bob Wilson is a retired journalist and teacher. He lives in southwest Durham.