With that much money at stake, preventing the construction of what could be the largest open-pit mine in North America -- at headwaters above Bristol Bay -- seems an impossible task.
As Pebble Ltd. Partnership prepares to submit its permit application outlining what kind of mine it wants to build by late this year or early next, Bristol Bay fishermen are fighting a fierce advance assault, hoping to persuade government decision-makers and the public that poisonous mine drainage and pristine salmon streams are a combination too risky to contemplate.
"The location could not possibly be worse on the face of the Earth," said former state Senate President Rick Halford. "This is a place of incredible value. It's going to be probably the biggest environmental resource fight of our lifetime."
In late July, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson met with dozens of mine opponents at Dillingham High School, where tribal leaders and commercial fishermen began a push to have the EPA wield its veto authority. The EPA has a seldom-used power to ban the discharge of dredged or fill material in certain circumstances. Pebble would create mountains of such material. A few days after the Dillingham meeting, Alaska U.S. Rep. Don Young introduced legislation to strip the EPA of that power.
For many fishermen here, it is inconceivable that an industrial-scale mine that could produce 8 billion tons of waste is being contemplated in an area home to healthy runs of five species of salmon. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar earlier this year called an offshore area southwest of Bristol Bay, through which the salmon migrate, "simply too special to drill" and placed it off-limits to offshore oil and gas development.
"It is a national treasure that we must protect," Salazar said.
WORK ON A BIG SCALE
Construction of the mine would bring an unprecedented level of industrial development to a region known until now for its solitude. It would require an 86-mile road and miles of pipelines, a deepwater port in Cook Inlet, a power plant capable of generating up to 300 megawatts of electricity and 200 miles of power transmission lines.
The Pebble Partnership in 2006 originally outlined the project in permit applications, describing an open pit possibly 2 square miles in size, with tailings impoundments of at least 10 square miles, behind embankments up to 740 feet high. The mining companies later withdrew those applications, saying they no longer know the scope of what they will propose. They have since said the richest part of the Pebble deposit might require underground mining rather than an initial open pit, although the amount of tailings, or waste rock, would remain huge.
The company has hinted that it will limit the size of the project if the environmental risks are too great.
"One of our core operating principles is to be able to demonstrate coexistence with the fishery. It's not going to be one industry at the expense of another," said Mike Heatwole, spokesman for the partnership, a 50-50 venture between London-based global mining company Anglo American and Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. of Canada.
The state Legislature has appropriated $750,000 for a full scientific review of the project's potential impacts on Bristol Bay, with a series of independent science panels scheduled to begin public meetings in December.
But at last month's meeting with the EPA, many local residents said they fear the state will railroad approval of Pebble and the meetings coming up are part of that.
DISTRUSTING MINES
The Pebble mine is only the largest of several being contemplated on 1.1 million acres of the Bristol Bay watershed.
It would lie near the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers and about 15 miles north of Lake Iliamna, nursery of some of the sockeye salmon.
Here in Dillingham and other communities along the bay, many fishermen fear that even a small amount of the toxic copper sulfide generated when copper is mined -- leached through porous rock or leaked from a broken pipe -- could be fatal to the fish that are their livelihood.
"Every other mine of this size, this type, near water has contaminated the water. There is not one example they can give us of something this size and this type that hasn't," said Lindsey Bloom, 30, a commercial salmon fisherman from Juneau who has been working with the conservation group Trout Unlimited to fight the mine.
"I don't have problems with mining in Alaska in general," said Katherine Carscallen, a third-generation fisherman from Dillingham. "But Pebble isn't really something you can compare to the rest. It's unbelievably huge. All the rest of the mines in Alaska could fit inside Pebble."
THE LURE OF JOBS
Polls show 80 percent of Bristol Bay residents opposed to the mine. But many residents of the Native Alaskan villages closest to Pebble have broken ranks with the fishing towns along Bristol Bay to the west and elected to remain neutral until mine operators conduct their studies and make a specific proposal.
They admit they are lured by the promise of 1,000 skilled, high-wage jobs over the 30-year life of the mine, 2,000 additional jobs during construction, and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual operating expenditures.
"Commercial fishing isn't sustaining and supporting our communities. We're basically dying up here," said Lisa Reimers, chief executive of the Iliamna Development Corp., a Native-owned venture at Iliamna that has won some work during Pebble's exploratory operations.
The village lies just 15 miles from Pebble. Reimers said she and other village leaders conducted their own research, which convinced them that healthy fisheries and mining can coexist.
"We're not pro-Pebble. We're neutral. We're trying to be open-minded about everything in our economy and figure out how our young people are going to support themselves," Reimers said. "Of course we care about the environment. This is our home."
DIGGING IN FOR BATTLE
In Dillingham and the surrounding communities, residents expect a long, expensive and intense fight that, they are coming to realize, could outlast their own lifetimes.
"Our opponents are multinational corporations," said Halford, the former state senator. "They have great advantages. They often pay the most, they hire the best and they're perpetual. They go on forever. We die. They can work on this kind of project for generations and they often do."
At a celebration of the end of sockeye season July 24 in Dillingham, Curyung tribal chief Tom Tilden, who runs a salmon boat, warned the community that they must teach the children how to fight the mine.
"It's going to be a long battle," he said afterward. "When you have that kind of wealth laying in the earth, it's eventually going to be dug up."
The Anchorage Daily News/adn.com contributed to this story.
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