WASHINGTON—U.S. Supreme Court justices, hearing a challenge to Virginia’s moratorium on uranium mining, struggled on Nov. 5 over how far states can go to ban mining of the radioactive metal for public-health reasons before overstepping federal law.
The justices heard an hour of arguments in an appeal by a company called Virginia Uranium Inc., seeking to revive a lawsuit thrown out by a lower court that aimed to invalidate Virginia’s ban, enacted in 1982. The company has said that ban conflicts with a federal law regulating nuclear-power generation.
