EPA pushes error-riddled assessment

The very founding of our country was premised upon resistance to governmental excesses. Authors and movie producers from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged ("A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.") to Steven Spielberg's "Men in Black" (Bug: "Place your projectile weapon on the ground." Edgar: "You can have my gun, when you pry it from my cold dead fingers." Bug: "Your proposal is acceptable.") have warned us against the rising tide of government intrusion into our lives.

The arrogance of federal agencies, especially when it comes to Alaska, has been documented incessantly since the Purchase. The most recent unimaginable manifestation of that phenomenon has occurred with the publication of the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment, which is currently being finalized for adoption by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The area subject to the assessment is huge, the amount of time the EPA has dedicated to its preparation does not pass the blush test, and predictably, it is riddled with significant, substantive errors in logic and science.

Innumerable commentators have stepped up to the plate to shine the spotlight of reason on this inept exercise; however, because 2012 is an election year, it is critical to this administration that the entire process be completed before the President is inaugurated in January - just in case there is a change in administrations.

Few Alaskans will have taken the time to read the assessment and fewer still will prepare and file incisive comments.

By the time this piece is published, the comment period will have passed.

Nonetheless, it seems important to document for all a sampling of the incredible deficiencies in the report. The following enumerates more than two dozen blatant errors that have been identified by the Alaska Miners Association in its effort to leverage the EPA away from the ill-conceived course which it is following:

The EPA purports to be analyzing the impacts of large-scale mining in the Bristol Bay watershed. Since the Pebble Project has not released a mining plan, the analysis ostensibly is not about Pebble; however, the thinly veiled hypothetical mine that is discussed unmistakably is the evil shadow of what a Pebble proposal might look like. In brief, however, the hypothetical mine neither resembles anything Pebble could ever imagine - an unpermittable project - nor does it correspond with any other imaginable project in southwest Alaska or anywhere else in the country.

Copper porphyry deposits are not representative of the mineral deposits in the Bristol Bay watershed. There are other significant deposits in the area that have been documented by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Geological Survey as well as a number of undiscovered deposits USGS deems probable. Their analyses estimate that there is 50 percent probability that there are 14 non-copper-porphyry deposits within the watershed.

The EPA's hypothetical mine overestimates the size of likely mines in Bristol Bay by more than five times the average open-pit mine in Alaska and British Columbia, and more than four times the average copper mine.

The EPA's hypothetical mine uses a non-representative geochemical make-up. There is no typical geochemical make-up for a metal ore that would be representative of all ores within a region; therefore, the geochemistry of one deposit cannot be used to represent the geochemistry or geochemical risks of other deposits in the area.

The EPA's hypothetical mine omits mitigation and prevention strategies that necessarily will be used by any large mines in the Bristol Bay watershed. Given the large variety of mitigation and prevention techniques available to today's mining industry, it would be an extraordinary coincidence if any as-yet un-designed mine used exactly the set of mitigation/prevention strategies that the EPA assumes in its hypothetical mine.

The EPA omits mitigation and prevention strategies that would eliminate or significantly reduce the impacts it predicts for its hypothetical mine. These include such strategies as dry tailings closure and moving the product by pipeline.

The EPA's hypothetical mine does not meet minimum permitting standards because the design used by the agency includes no mitigation provisions for eliminating anadromous fish habitat and wetlands impacts. Waste rock cannot be placed in such a creek under state or federal regulatory standards. Accordingly the hypothetical mine as proposed by the EPA could not be permitted.

The EPA overestimates the realistic mine size. The habitat modification description in the assessment is a direct consequence of the mine size and location. As the EPA overestimated the mine size for other mines, the habitat modification impacts are significantly overestimated.

The watershed assessment lacks a realistic water budget. Therefore the water withdrawal impacts cannot be confirmed, analyzed or disputed.

It is quite possible that mines within the watershed would not be developed using a road. Therefore, the predicted impacts from road construction and operation cannot be taken as representing an impact of large-scale mining in the watershed.

The EPA proposes a specific road alignment and by implication construction techniques and then disparages them because of the environmental impacts they will cause. The obvious solution is to provide a higher level of design/construction standards to eliminate the impacts.

The EPA, incidentally, failed to reach the same conclusions that it reached in the assessment with regard to two other mine roads it has approved.

Today's mining practices are hugely more protective of the environment than those of even 1990. Therefore, statistical prediction from legacy mines does not represent the statistical probability of failure from modern mines, nor does it represent the protective practices that the mining industry uses today and that state and federal government agencies require.

The EPA's lack of design details makes its analysis of water collection and treatment failure events meaningless. The agency does not evaluate any specific failure modes or present data on similar failures at other mines.

The analysis omits any discussion of prevention and mitigation strategies. Mines typically have back-up systems in case effluent escapes from the primary containment mechanism.

The analysis ignores Alaska's excellent record of protecting water quality and fish.

Conclusions in the assessment's executive summary contradict the conclusions in the body of the document. The analysis in the assessment says, "The probability of failure cannot be estimated from the data," but the executive summary says that the probability of failure is "high." There is no justification in the body of the assessment for the conclusion stated in the executive summary.

The EPA came to different conclusions in other mine analyses. In environmental impact statements for at least two mines on which the EPA was the lead agency, it did not even mention the risk. It is inconsistent of the EPA to conclude that the probability of a water treatment and collection failure is "high" and the consequence of failure severe, when the identical issue did not even rise to the level of discussion in other recent analyses by the agency on the same subject.

A pipeline may be required to develop a mine at Pebble, but no other mine in Alaska uses a pipeline. Because most mines do not use a pipeline, the predicted pipeline risks are unlikely to be representative of a mine other than at the Pebble Project in the Bristol Bay watershed.

The EPA's hypothetical pipeline omits obvious prevention and design strategies. In fact, some components of a mine are fixed and are difficult to change, but pipelines can be designed to different standards. It is unclear why the EPA would design a pipeline with an unacceptable risk and not include design changes to decrease the risk.

The EPA came to a different conclusion for a potential mine pipeline at the Red Dog Mine where the federal agency recommended a pipeline. In that case the agency concluded that "it is highly unlikely that the pipelines would be compromised."

Not all mines have dams and, as the assessment states "<a>fter mine closure, [tailings ponds] can be drained eliminating the consequences of tailings dam failures." Despite the potential to eliminate the risk, the EPA's hypothetical mine uses a wet closure to represent what it expects to be typical of large-mine impacts in Alaska. The predicted impact from the EPA's hypothetical mine most likely does not represent other as-yet-to-be designed mines in the watershed, and may not represent the risks from a mine at the Pebble Project.

Numerous potential large mine locations in the Bristol Bay watershed would have significantly less risk than the location chosen for the EPA's hypothetical mine.

In brief, the EPA has generated a fundamentally flawed work product that is specifically intended to be used for a political purpose. The document deserves to be withdrawn, and if a Bristol Bay watershed assessment actually is necessary and authorized by law, it needs to be prepared with vastly more professional care.