Alaska News

Does initiative take science into account?

Radio and television personality Shannyn Moore asks regarding the Pebble project: "Why shouldn't residents of the borough (Lake and Peninsula) have a voice? It's their destiny at stake." It is a reasonable request but not what is being asked for in the borough initiative, which actually sounds more like a pre-emptive permitting right that trumps that of the state. And that is unfair.

The Pebble project is entirely on land that belongs to the state. Its subsurface estate belongs entirely to the state, hence to every citizen. Under existing law, if the project is economic and can meet reinforceable permitting requirements, it should be allowed to proceed.

Citizens of the Lake and Peninsula Borough should and do have a voice through the mine permitting process, but 1,631 people should not trump 720,000.

As described by Moore, the borough's initiative request sounds almost easy: "Any resource extraction development using more than 640 acres of land that would adversely affect anadromous waters would require a permit from the Lake and Peninsula Borough before the state and federal permits could go through." But whose acres? Bristol Bay Native Corporation's, state of Alaska, federal?

Can the borough build up a staff of permitters with scientific credentials that could maintain their position? What's an adverse effect? One salmon?

Are Pebble's mail-outs lies? Is anyone other than Pebble going to pay millions of dollars of improvement taxes to fund borough schools? Is anyone other than Pebble going to invest more than $5 billion in capital or spend millions of dollars on job creation?

Moreover, to create jobs that aren't short term -- mines like Pebble are hundred-year projects. (Bingham Canyon, Chuquicamata, and El Teniente are mines very similar to Pebble that come to mind as they pass their 100-year anniversaries.)

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Moore's positions exemplify a major difficulty in the Pebble debate, namely a lack of technical knowledge that is magnified in rural Alaska. An example is in tailings: The volumes of silicate tailings that largely fill tailing impoundments are admittedly huge, but they are not toxic.

The tailings of porphyry copper-type deposits are mainly composed of quartz, feldspar, mica-clay, with a very small percentage of pyritic tailings. The impoundments are not like water storage dams that may hold back hundreds of feet of water. In tailing impoundments, a thin sheet of water, itself non-toxic, covers the silicate tailings and prevents oxidation and acidification of pyrite. The impoundments are not prone to failure during seismic events and basically solids, instead of water, are dammed up.

Chile, which has more large porphyry tailings fields than any country and is also as seismically active as Alaska, has not had a major tailings failure for decades. Notably the Chilean magnitude 8.5 earthquake of 2010 happened near several mining operations without incident.

The people behind the Pebble project are as dedicated and sure of the merits of their cause as their opposition. Alaska, all of it, will be the only loser if the Pebble project fails on anything other than a factual basis.

Charles C. "Chuck" Hawley is a geologist and a director of Truth About Pebble. He lives in Anchorage.

By CHUCK HAWLEY

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