AncienTrails

Samhain                                                           Winter Moon

Today’s Star-Tribune has an excellent article by Lee Schafer, business columnist:  PolyMet mine report has a giant hole in it.

An excerpt:

“Late last week, the voluminous environmental impact report for the first project in what could be a major expansion of mining in Minnesota, PolyMet Mining’s proposed copper-nickel mining operation near Hoyt Lakes, was released, but without much that was meaningful about financial assurance.

(William Ervin)

It’s baffling that over a decade into the project’s evolution, the public still knows next to nothing about the financial assurance provision. It’s hardly trivial, given that the proposed mining and processing operation could require the treatment of water for more than 500 years.

The idea behind requiring financial assurance to make sure there’s money to contain and clean up polluted sites is really pretty simple. A mine is operated by a corporation that could go bankrupt, or fold up like a circus and leave town once the money has all been made and the mine is played out…

It takes up a little over three pages in a report so big that just the glossary alone is nearly five times bigger. It has a one-line table, showing estimates of cost if the mine were to close at the end of year one, at the end of year 11, or at the end of year 20. The high end of the cost-estimate range is $200 million….

If operating a water treatment facility costs $1 million a year, the financial assurance for PolyMet should be easily manageable, he said. “But if that operating cost got up to $10 million a year, that is pushing $1 billion to pay for that. That’s why at PolyMet it becomes an issue.””

Financial assurance connects directly to the question of tailings runoff.  PolyMet will claim that its estimates are correct because their new, never-before-proven technology will create safer tailings and tailing’s ponds.  No sulfide mine ever, anywhere has created a safe tailing’s situation.

The basic problem is simple.  The overburden and the rock not containing copper, nickel and other valuable metals contains sulfur. When rain and snow and sleet fall, melting water runs through the massive hills of tailings.  The water which runs off the tailings creates a sulfuric acid load.  But, it’s water, too.  So it flows into the watershed around the Hoyt Lake’s plant.

“That sulfates can kill manoomin is evidenced by the Wild Rice Dead Zone – a stretch that begins where the Bine-ziibi (Partridge River) enters into Gichigamiwi-ziibi (St. Louis River) and extends 140 miles to the Anishinaabeg-Gichigami Maamawijiwan (Lake Superior Basin). The Wild Rice Dead Zone is the result of extremely high concentrations of sulfate released by U.S. Steel’s Keetac and Minntac taconite mines. Sulfide mining will add yet more sulfates into rivers and lakes thereby affecting the food that grows on water.”   (IC Magazine, Supporting Indigenous People)

A bonus feature of this area is that a confluence of continental divides makes some water head down the Mississippi to the dead zones of the Gulf, some water heads into Lake Superior on ies way to the Atlantic, while other water drains out of the tailings ponds into streams headed for Hudson Bay.  That way one mine can pollute three different large bodies of water and streams and rivers along the way.

Thus, to prevent acid drainage over the potentially 500 year long exposure to toxic runoff either requires a lot of money or excellent unproven technology.  Or, ideally, both.

As Schafer points out in a video discussion, Shakespeare was writing 500 years ago.  500 years is a long time.  The iron range gets 20 years of jobs against centuries of ruinous pollution.  Public policy must weigh the balancing benefits.