Environment assessment for Alaska’s Pebble mine ‘theatre of the absurd’ – Northern Dynasty- by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – June 5, 2013)

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TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Dual-listed project developer Northern Dynasty Minerals has filed a 205-page submission with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to its call for public comments on the revised draft Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment (BBWA), calling the draft report and the process used to complete it “biased, manipulative and contrary to the EPA’s own guidelines”.

Northern Dynasty president and CEO Ronald Thiessen said the 2013 draft BBWA, released in April, suffers from the same significant shortcomings as the original report published in May 2012 – in particular, that the EPA continued to assess the environmental effects of a hypothetical mine of its own invention, one that did not employ modern engineering standards, environmental safeguards or project-specific mitigation measures and could not be permitted under US or Alaska law.

Despite the fact that the EPA’s “hypothetical mine” was sited at the location of the Pebble deposit, Northern Dynasty believed the BBWA authors continued to refuse to consider the most extensive scientific data set available on the region – environmental baseline data collected by the Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP) at a cost of about $150-million.

Northern Dynasty said the EPA’s failure to fully consider the PLP’s environmental data was contrary to its own guidelines for data quality and was compounded by the fact that the BBWA study authors had never set foot on the Pebble project site.

“The BBWA process has truly become the ‘theatre of the absurd’.

“Rather than waiting for the PLP to submit a proposed development plan for consideration by federal and state regulatory agencies under the National Environmental Policy Act, something that is expected to occur this year, [the] EPA has invented its own hypothetical mine, it has continued to ignore modern mine engineering practices and regulatory requirements, it has shunned the best available scientific and environmental data at its disposal and it has created a public and peer review process designed to minimise scientific scrutiny of its work,” Thiessen said.

He added that Northern Dynasty believed the BBWA process to be a cynical effort to manipulate public perception about a project before it had been proposed or undergone federal and state permitting.

“And we believe the draft BBWA to be a fundamentally biased report that should have no bearing on the future of America’s most important undeveloped mineral resource,” Thiessen said.

Northern Dynasty sent a letter to EPA acting administrator Bob Perciasepe, stating that the federal agency had also failed to provide for an open, objective and transparent public and scientific review of the 2013 draft BBWA by unnecessarily restricting public comment opportunities on a more than 1 300-page document and restricting public access to its peer review panel, ignoring the agency’s own guidelines for scientific peer review.

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