If a mining company has nowhere to place its tailings and other detritus, that’s pretty much a killer for such a project.
And that is what the Biden Administration has done to the Pebble Mine Mine, a potentially destructive gold mining operation that had been proposed near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, one of the top salmon fisheries in the world.
That salmon fishery has a value of more than $2 billion annually and employs more than 15,000 people, directly and indirectly. The fear was that waste from such a mining operation would leak into nearby streams and into the ocean, and harm the fishery.
See a report from Bloomberg, here.
The Environmental Protection Agency issued a formal recommendation Thursday to bar the disposal of mining waste in Bristol Bay, which hosts the world’s largest harvest of the fish. If finalized, that would effectively block efforts by Pebble Limited Partnership to extract gold, copper and molybdenum from southwestern Alaska.
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The move represents the penultimate step in a Clean Water Act process that EPA Region 10 Administrator Casey Sixkiller said would “help protect salmon fishery areas that support world-class commercial and recreational fisheries and that have sustained Alaska Native communities for thousands of years.”
For more information on what the mine could have done, see Save Bristol Bay, and these, from Earthjustice and the World Wildlife Fund.
Let’s take a look:
When in college, way back when, I had a brief summer job at a cannery in the village of Naknek. I worked with a Japanese crew making salmon “caviar” to sell in that country. I’ve never been so cold and wet for such long days of work, but I’d do it all again.