By RUSTY DENNEN

RICHMOND--

But at a forum on the topic yesterday hosted by the Garden Club of Virginia at the University of Richmond, panelists were split on whether that could happen.

Patrick Wales, geologist and project manager for Virginia Uranium Inc., said the company is interested only in its Coles Hill site in Pittsylvania. The county is about 180 miles southwest of the Fredericksburg area.

"I understand why others would want to expand this" to other areas in the state, he said. "They [opponents] would like to make this seem like it's a statewide issue."

The moratorium is a concern here because in the 1970s, Marline Uranium Corp. secured leases on thousands of acres in Orange, Culpeper, Madison and Fauquier counties with a plan to mine and mill the radioactive mineral.

The Marline leases were withdrawn in the early 1980s when uranium prices plummeted, and projected demand for enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power plants fell after the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.

In a lunch-break session with reporters, Wales said a state geologist concluded that Coles Hill is the only economically viable deposit in Virginia.

"And it's not as though other parts of the state have not been scoured; many were in the 1970s."

Robert Bodnar, a professor of geochemistry at Virginia Tech, who has worked for Chevron, the U.S. Geological Survey and mining projects around the globe, said economics are key to the industry.

"Mining is a business activity, driven in this country by profit. If there's a deposit and you can't make money, you're not gonna see mining."

Virginia Uranium says there are 119 million pounds of uranium at its 3,000-acre site, worth an estimated $10 billion. Some opponents claim the actual amount that can be recovered and processed is roughly half the company's estimate.

As to whether deposits outside Pittsylvania could be tapped, "If the price goes up, there might be mining where there's other uranium occurrences in the state," Bodnar said.