What happens when you discover uranium in your backyard.

As is often the case with tales of great discovery, the details of how buried treasure came to be found beneath the rolling countryside of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, have grown a little gauzy over the last 30 years. But here is the story as the prospectors tell it. One day, in March 1979, a man named Byrd Berman, a geologist by training, was driving down a road through cattle pastures when the scintillometer sitting on the dashboard of his Hertz rental car began to beep. The device, similar to a Geiger counter, was designed to detect the gamma radiation naturally emitted by uranium. As he watched the needle on the scintillometer dance, Berman was certain he’d hit something huge, fissile, and extraordinarily valuable.

Uranium, as everyone knows, is used to make the fuel for nuclear reactors, and, at the time, it was in huge demand. Nuclear power was considered to be the energy source of the future, and America was in the midst of building or planning hundreds of plants. All of them needed uranium. Berman was working for a company called Marline Uranium and a boss named Al Swanson, who was himself something of a prospecting legend. Swanson had discovered a rich uranium strike in his home country of Canada, and he thought he saw some geological similarities to that deposit along America’s eastern seaboard. Specifically, he was intrigued by a vast network of depressions known as the Triassic Basins, formations created around 200 million years ago by the tectonic processes that split North America from Africa, opening up the Atlantic Ocean. Swanson dispatched men to canvass the basins from North Carolina to New Jersey, but, for a long time, nothing panned out--until Byrd Berman happened to drive past the right farm.

Returning to the company’s office, Berman knew he’d hit a memorable strike. “I came in and I said there was no question in my mind that we had fifty million pounds,” Berman recalled recently. “I was kind of conservative.” The next day, he returned to the same place with another Marline geologist, Henry Singletary. When they got to the right spot, the prospectors pulled over. “Him being senior man on the thing, it was me that had to get down in the muddy ditch and dig the sample,” Singletary says. He took a hammer and knocked loose a few pieces of rock, which gave an off-the-charts reading for radioactivity. Later, the samples were found to contain four to five times as much uranium as is typically found in commercial mines. And it was right there at the surface, meaning the ore would be fairly simple to extract.

“I said, ‘Well, here’s the biggest find in a long time of uranium,’” Berman recalls. That night, he went back to his hotel room savoring his luck. “I turned on the television and what were they talking about? They were talking about a strange place called Three Mile Island.” That very day, as Berman remembers it, there had been an accident at a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. (The coincidental timing may sound like a tall tale, but Singletary’s memory was similar: He thinks their discovery occurred the same week as Three Mile Island, though maybe not the same day.) While there were no deaths as a result of the partial meltdown, a significant amount of radioactive gas escaped into the atmosphere. The accident--combined with the release of a reactor disaster movie, The China Syndrome, around the same time--would transform the way Americans regarded nuclear power. “So I was elated in the morning,” Berman says, “and, by night, it fell apart.”

What Berman and Singletary had found is today thought to be one of the ten richest uranium deposits in the world--containing up to 120 million pounds. But, while Marline did a lot of exploratory drilling in the area, the company never got to dig it up. Amid the anti-nuclear backlash that followed Three Mile Island, Virginians rose up in protest against Marline’s mining plans. Actress Sissy Spacek, recently transplanted to a farm outside Charlottesville, visited the state capitol to tell starstruck legislators about alleged connections between uranium and cancer, and Governor Charles Robb signed a moratorium on mining uranium, which was meant to give the state government time to impose regulations. Instead, while a task force deliberated, market forces finished the work environmentalists had begun. U.S. utilities pulled the plug on roughly 100 planned nuclear plants, partly due to safety issues, but also because reactors already under construction were going way over budget. In 1984, the state uranium task force issued a qualified endorsement of mining, concluding it could be done with stringent safeguards. But Marline had run into financing problems and abandoned the project. The moratorium stayed in place. Meanwhile, the nuclear power industry went into a long period of somnolence, and nearly all of America’s uranium mines closed down. Berman and Singletary’s discovery was left in the ground--though it was never quite forgotten.