The Battle for Bristol Bay - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 268

low levels, and salmon are some of the most sensitive fish around,” said Carol Ann
Woody, a former USGS fisheries biologist. “If the state permits the Pebble mine, it will
be putting public resources—which the salmon and the water are—at stake. That is just
plain wrong.”
Bob Moran , the Colorado hydrogeologist, who has advised some of Pebble's critics,
said, “Even when a mine is well run, it is unavoidable that chemical contaminants will
be released into the environment. I know of no comparable large-scale ore body that has
been mined without release of significant concentrations of contaminants into nearby
waters over the long term. And I don't know of any other mine built near such a valu-
able and potentially vulnerable fishery anywhere in the world.”
Sean Magee , PLP's former director of public affairs, acknowledged, “In many re-
spects, it's the water issues that are the most challenging…. If we can't protect the fish
and the water and the wildlife, then we won't proceed with the project.” In spite of such
reassuring words, PLP has continued to invest in Pebble, explore the deposit aggress-
ively, and prepare itself for the state's permitting process, which is slated to begin in 2011
or 2012.
THE RICHES IN THE ROCK
In the late 1990s, several years after Phil St. George first staked out a mining claim for
Cominco Alaska Exploration , the company, renamed Teck Cominco, spent $8 million
to drill exploratory core samples around the Pebble mine site, to get a sense of what lay
beneath the tundra. The company estimated the minerals there were worth about $10
billion. Teck Cominco continued to sink boreholes into the site until 2001, when, for
reasons that have never been made public, the company, which has years of experience
mining in the difficult conditions of Alaska, decided to sell of its Pebble holdings. Teck
Cominco blamed “environmental reasons,” which presumably meant that conditions at
the site were too daunting, or that operating a mine there would have such a negative
impact on the ecosystem that it would be prohibitive. The company sold its rights for
$10 million, a relative pittance, and, unusually, did not keep a share in the project.
The buyer was Northern Dynasty Minerals (NDM), a subsidiary of the global mining
giant Hunter Dickinson, which is based in Vancouver. (Rio Tinto, based in London and
Melbourne, owns 19.8 percent of NDM, and Mitsubishi, the Japanese conglomerate,
owns 6.1 percent.) In 2007, NDM formed a ity-ity partnership with Anglo American
PLC, the world's second-largest mining concern, based in Johannesburg and London.
Anglo American has been mining around the world for over a hundred years, has oper-
ations in forty-five countries on seven continents, and with a near-majority stake in the