The proposed Donlin Gold mine site sits in isolated wilderness around 10 miles from the middle Kuskokwim River community of Crooked Creek. If constructed, it would be one of the largest open-pit gold mines in the world.
Critics say that the potential environmental impacts of the proposed mine, both during its estimated 27-year lifespan and many years into the future, make it a risk not worth taking. This was a key theme in a presentation hosted by the Mother Kuskokwim Tribal Coalition at the Yupiit Picaryarait Cultural Center in Bethel on Sept. 18. It was the first of two Donlin-focused events that came to the Western Alaska hub community last month.
Event one: Mother Kuskokwim tailings dam study
Dr. David Chambers, a mining expert and geophysicist who has also been an outspoken critic of the proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, was one of two people invited to speak at the event.
"Basically, it comes down to, are we as a society willing to take the risk to get the benefits today, because that's when those benefits accrue, but we leave this liability for future generations?" Chambers asked the room.
Chambers was responding to a question about what happens to a mine the size Donlin proposes to build decades or even centuries down the road. After ceasing operations, millions of tons of waste rock and finely ground waste material known as tailings, containing an assortment of toxic chemicals such as arsenic and mercury, would be left behind. At the site, the ensuing contaminated water would likely need to be treated in perpetuity, according to environmental law firm Earthjustice.
But much of the Mother Kuskokwim event focused on more immediate concerns, specifically the roughly 470-foot tall tailings dam that Donlin has proposed to contain the toxic slurry that the mine would generate while in operation.
Dillon Ragar is a water resources scientist with environmental technology company Lynker. He presented the findings of a report commissioned by Mother Kuskokwim and advocacy group Native Movement. The report looks at the potential effects of a catastrophic tailings dam failure, like those in 2014 at Mount Polley in British Columbia and in 2019 at Brumadinho in Brazil.
The report uses geographical data modeling to estimate where a massive deluge of contaminated water and tailings might end up if the proposed tailings dam were breached. The model looks at scenarios where 5%, 50%, and 90% of the total capacity of the tailings dam is released.
"All of our scenarios, including the 5% breach scenarios, showed tailings being transported into the Kuskokwim River," Ragar explained. "So these downstream communities are going to be faced more with environmental and chemical impacts, more so than the physical impacts."
While the lower end of modeled tailings dam spills would result in severe ecological damage to salmon-spawning streams in the immediate area, the report finds that a more severe breach would likely destroy the community of Crooked Creek and send toxic tailings as far downriver as Bethel.
The final environmental impact statement for the proposed mine, currently being challenged in federal court, only looked at a tailings dam spill of 0.5%. Critics of the proposed mine say that this number is far too small to assess potential impacts. Last week, a federal judge agreed with six tribes that the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management violated federal laws in their analysis.
In the discussion that followed Ragar’s presentation, community members voiced concerns about the potential effects of the proposed mine, both in the short term and long term.
But Donlin Gold and its Native corporation partners that own the land and the rights to mine it say that they have the answers to these questions. Just 10 days after the Mother Kuskokwim event, Donlin hosted its own event in Bethel, held in a building owned by the local tribal entity currently suing the federal government in opposition to Donlin.
Event two: Donlin Gold informational presentation
In a four and a half hour presentation, representatives from Donlin Gold, subsurface rights owner Calista Corporation, and landowner The Kuskokwim Corporation (TKC) systematically responded to concerns about the mine echoed by its opponents in recent years.
The discussion touched on issues at the core of four separate lawsuits calling the proposed mine into question. One that came up early on was increased barge traffic on the Kuskokwim River.
Bethel Elder Gloria Simeon, a member of the Mother Kuskokwim Coalition, noted the potential public safety risk.
"I worry about boats, people with 14-foot Lunds and 50-horse[power] motors traveling on the river to do their subsistence and to travel as we do on the river, and be put in danger because of this increased barge traffic," Simeon said.
Calista’s director of business development, Alba Brice, said that Donlin Gold’s current plan is to tow clusters of four barges with a tugboat up the Kuskokwim to a proposed port near the mine site.
"The traffic amount would be about three barge tows a day, that's what the project has right now," Brice said.
Concerns about barge traffic from the proposed mine go back years. But in 2021, the state approved the right-of-way for a natural gas pipeline that proponents say would significantly reduce this traffic. Donlin Gold spokesperson Samantha Angiak-Miller said that the proposed level of barging would be manageable.
"Through the natural gas pipeline adaptation, we were able to reduce barge traffic by at least half," Angiak-Miller said. "So we mentioned earlier the barge communication plan. That is something that we have been working on to make sure that both the barge operators and river users will understand when the barges are coming, what needs to happen, who needs to know about that, and how we can move forward safely."
In response, multiple people brought up the environmental impact of the proposed gas pipeline itself, which would cross numerous streams on its roughly 315-mile journey to Cook Inlet. Donlin Gold said that these concerns are already addressed in its reclamation plan, intended to return the land to something resembling its natural state.
When attendees at the pro-Donlin event came to the theme of toxic tailings that were at the center of the anti-Donlin event held 10 days earlier, Donlin Gold’s interim general manager, Enric Fernandez, stepped in.
"We hear this concern often, about the tailings. This is not something that anybody wants to happen. [...] We're going to have monitoring, we'll have instrumentation. We'll have procedures that we can use to see if there is something going on wrong with the dam before it happens," Fernandez said. "We're going to have multiple tiers to review those monitoring [...]. They'll be the dam engineers, they'll be the state of Alaska, and they'll be Calista and TKC as well. [...] There is a large number of devices that are there to sense if there is anything that is wrong with the dam before it happens."
In response after response, Fernandez and around a dozen of the faces leading the charge to mine the hills north of Crooked Creek addressed the perceived risks of the proposed Donlin Gold mine. Although some in the audience were on opposite sides of one of the most divisive issues in Western Alaska, the atmosphere remained civil over the course of nearly five hours.
In closing, Bethel Elder Evon Waska, wearing a handmade "No Donlin Gold" t-shirt, spoke directly to the tribal representatives who may ultimately have the final say on the mine.
"Think of your people. We the people, we're here 365 days a year. We rely on subsistence, and that comes from the Kuskokwim," Waska said.
For now, the fate of the proposed Donlin Gold project rests largely in the hands of state and federal courts. Oral arguments in the cases challenging the mine’s water rights and the proposed pipeline's right-of-way are scheduled to be heard in state court on Nov. 12.
