The Battle for Bristol Bay - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 272

world holding perhaps 2.5 billion tons of toxic tailings, with miles of roads, bridges,
pipelines, and power lines snaking here and there. PLP now estimates the mine will cost
over $6 billion to build, a figure three times the initial estimate.
After we passed over Frying Pan Lake, the chopper lost altitude, bucked in a cross-
wind, and landed about two hundred yards from a temporary drill rig.
The rig and a small wooden shack had been placed here by helicopter and sat on
wooden skids, so as not to harm the tundra. With a loud clatter, it was extracting
core samples from deep underground. We jumped out and watched three scruffy men
pulling sections of pipe out of the borehole, carefully removing rock-core samples and
placing them in cardboard sleeves (the samples would be taken to a lab in Iliamna, in-
spected, and cataloged), then running new sections of pipe down the hole again. A hose
snaked from a nearby pond, to supply the rig with water. The drill was noisy and the
men worked quickly, with few words. Then the wind kicked up, and it was time to fly.
To help gain what John Shively calls the “social license” to mine here—industry jar-
gon for obtaining permission from the local community—the Pebble Partnership main-
tains that it has gone “beyond the state's environmental guidelines” to maintain a light
footprint on the land. Instead of etching new roads into the fragile tundra with bull-
dozers, for example, the PLP ferries most of its people and equipment by helicopter or
snowmobile. Groundwater is monitored. By 2008, the partnership had spent “in excess
of $100 million” on assessing the mine's potential environmental and sociological im-
pacts, as is required by the permitting process.
Pebble mine, its developers say, will be good for Alaska: it probably won't use all of
the water it has requested, the explosions used to loosen rock will be contained, the gi-
gantic dams will be engineered to withstand earthquakes, the poisonous tailings will be
perfectly safe forever, and Pebble will bring nothing but good fortune to an impover-
ished corner of the state. This is a potent message, and many Natives support the mine.
The PLP has issued a steady stream of reassuring scientific reports about air, soil, and
water quality at the site that have been posted on the company's website. Shively noted
that the mine site is on public land (PLP owns rights to the minerals, not the land) and
that skeptics are welcome to visit it and perform their own tests there, as the Nature
Conservancy has done.
But, critics counter, PLP's tests are performed by consultants, its reports are written
in-house and are not peer-reviewed, and the company refuses to detail its mining plans
for independent review, making its reams of data useless. Critics are suspicious that the
company is pretending to be open, while spinning the story to suit its agenda.
Mining is considered one of the dirtiest industries in the world. he chemicals used
to process minerals are often poisonous, including lime and sodium hydroxide, sodium
cyanide, hydrochloric acid, sodium metabisulfite, copper sulfate, polypropylene glycol