The Battle for Bristol Bay - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 273

methyl ether, xanthates, dithiophosphate and thionocarbamate, and methyl isobutyl
carbinol.
The EPA estimates that hard-rock mining has contaminated the headwaters of over
40 percent of watersheds in the American West. In 2006, the agency estimated that the
cost of cleaning up the worst of many abandoned mine sites in the United States would
be at least $20 billion, or almost three times the EPA's budget for 2007. Long-term wa-
ter treatment is often the costliest aspect of mine cleanup, and an increasing number of
large mines like Pebble require water treatment of tailings “forever.”
Mining's dirty legacy is due in large part to the General Mining Law of 1872, passed
by Congress to encourage economic development in the West. Calling mining the “best
use” of public land, it allowed miners to extract precious metals for a token fee and made
no provision for environmental cleanup. Now an estimated sixteen thousand miles of
streams are polluted, as are lakes and reservoirs. Mining industry officials vigorously
defend the statute and say the absence of federal guidelines has given rise to a tight reg-
ulatory framework and state laws that protect water, air, and endangered species. But
the evidence is not reassuring.
In June 2009 the US Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, to allow the Kensington gold mine,
northwest of Juneau, to dump as much as 4.5 million tons a year of mine-waste slurry
into Lower Slate Lake—even though it would certainly kill the lake's fish. The Kensing-
ton ruling was based on a 2002 Bush administration rule that allowed the dumping of
mine waste into previously protected waters. Until that rule, the Clean Water Act had
stipulated that the Army Corps of Engineers could dump “fill material” in waters while
building levees and bridges. The Bush rule enlarged the definition of fill to include con-
taminated mining waste. As of this writing, it is unclear whether the court's ruling on
Kensington set a precedent that would affect water use at Pebble. But Bristol Bay res-
idents have long worried about the PLP's plan to dump mine waste into Lake Iliamna.
“ We will not put tailings into Lake Iliamna , ” Shively told me. “There's no lake big enough
up there for the tailings.” The company claims this idea has been shelved. (According to
the AnchorageDailyNews, Pebble could conceivably ill in a different lake with clean
dirt and load mining waste on top of it without breaking the law. Other mines in Alaska
have used this tactic, including the Pogo and the Fort Knox gold mines.)
The mine that most resembles the open pit proposed for Pebble is the Bingham
Canyon Mine (aka the Kennecott Copper Mine), near Salt Lake City. It is the largest
copper, gold, and molybdenum mine in North America, for the moment, with an ore
body only half the size of Pebble's. Pollution from Bingham Canyon has contaminated
sixty square miles of groundwater in Utah. This resulted in the building of the largest
waste-water treatment plant in the United States: it is designed to treat 2.7 billion gal-
lons of polluted water annually for at least forty years.