—MEDIA ADVISORY—July 27, 2006—
In a story aired statewide yesterday on APRN, Governor
Frank Murkowski suggested that the Bristol Bay Watershed
is too valuable and too sensitive to threaten with
open pit, metallic sulfide mining. This is especially
true when you consider that, unlike the oil and
gas industry, the mining industry fails to pay fair
market value for the minerals it purchases from
the state. While the governor and legislators are
clamoring for higher taxes on the oil and gas sector,
which paid taxes in excess of 20% in 2005, the mining
industry paid only 0.7%. With so much at risk and
so little to gain, threatening the world’s
greatest salmon fishery and world class trout streams
with enormous metallic sulfide mines doesn’t
make much sense. We applaud the governor for speaking
up on behalf of the region’s clean water, abundant
fisheries and the countless Alaskan jobs and families
they support.
Unfortunately, some statements made during the
APRN story may have created the inaccurate impression
that underground block caving, now considered at
the proposed Pebble East Mine, is somehow benign
or less risky than open pit mining. Commenting on
this mistaken impression, Dr. David Chambers of
the Center for Science in Public Participation issued
the following statement this morning. Dr. Chambers
is a geophysicist, environmental planner, and former
Alaskan who has worked on mining projects in Alaska
since 1991.
“In the Pebble case, I'm not sure that underground
block caving has any environmental advantages to
open pit mining,” Chambers said. “You
still have approximately the same amount of waste
to deal with, you still have environmental liabilities
with groundwater contamination because you’re
almost certainly going to create subsidence at the
surface and create a pathway for water to filter
its way down through the mine workings. When it
does that it picks up contaminants and moves them
downstream. You may have many of the same problems
with an open pit. Open pit mines tend to collect
water and contamination in the pit, but block caving
can cause the exact same problems. With block caving
you can essentially have an underground open pit
that is full of waste material.”
For Additional Information:
-See APRN's July 26, 2006 Story:
-Risks of Block Caving at the Proposed Pebble East
Mine
Download document from http://www.csp2.org/reports.htm
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