The Battle for Bristol Bay - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 265

Since 2002, a multinational group called the Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP), a
partnership between Northern Dynasty Minerals and Anglo American PLC, which
owns the mineral rights to 153 miles of mining claims around the site, has spent close
to $400 million conducting soil and seismic tests, monitoring groundwater, and drilling
over eight hundred exploratory boreholes up to a mile deep, in preparation for mining
the site. If the Pebble mine is built, it will become the largest in North America and one
of the largest mines in the world. Its giant open pit would spread nearly two miles wide
at the top and sink over seventeen hundred feet deep at the bottom. (The Empire State
Building, at 1,250 feet high, could easily it inside.) It would bring thousands of work-
ers to what is now a remote and largely uninhabited region, and the mine could oper-
ate for fifty to a hundred years. To extract minerals from the Pebble Deposit, at least 8
billion tons of rock would be crushed, of which only 0.6 percent would be useful ore.
The remaining 99.4 percent of the tailings, or waste rock, would be deposited in massive
dumps and covered with water “in perpetuity,” to prevent toxic chemicals in the tailings
from reacting with oxygen and creating sulfuric acids. The water and tailings would be
contained behind five massive dams, including one of the tallest dams in the United
States, at 754 feet tall, and the tallest earthen dam, at 740 feet tall, both of which are
taller than the Three Gorges Dam in China (607 feet high).
The immense cost of building these facilities is not the only hurdle to building Pebble
mine. Also standing in the way are a series of state environmental permits, the possibil-
ity of federal intervention, and a rising wail of protest that has reached around the globe.
Pebble's supporters argue that the mine will create well-paid jobs in an impoverished
region; it will generate large tax revenues for the state; and it will provide significant
amounts of precious metals, which will lessen America's reliance on foreign supplies.
Environmental protections and safety measures at the mine will be state-of-the-art, PLP
has promised.
But Bristol Bay is a special place, a natural jewel that is home to one of the last
pristine salmon habitats let in the county, and the mine's critics believe that PLP's prom-
ises are too good to be true. The risks of destroying such an ecologically rich zone are
too great, detractors say, and they would like the federal government to step in and pre-
serve the region as a wildlife sanctuary or national park.
Opposition sprang up in the early 1990s, almost as soon as the mine was announced.
A loose collection of Natives, fishermen, environmentalists, academics, cannery oper-
ators, ordinary citizens, NGOs, state legislators, and businessmen began to ask pointed
questions about the size and impact of the project. They were concerned that an earth-
quake from nearby faults could destroy Pebble's massive dams, unleashing a wave of
toxins. They wondered how the mine's explosions and giant rock crushers would affect
the caribou and moose herds that Natives rely on for food. They fretted that new roads