Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Trump clears the way for Pebble

The idiot is waxing political, as if she has clue #1.

Copper and other heavy metals have no half-life. There are 2,000 year old Roman mines in Britain and elsewhere that are still contaminating adjacent streams to the point of lifelessness for some distance downstream. every flood/ heavy rainstorm refreshes.

Kenai River is arguably "world famous" for it's king and sockeye runs. Escapement goal for reds is 500-750,000.

I crewed deckhand one year out in Bristol Bay on a fish strangler.. The escapement goal for the Illiamna Lake watershed that year was 13 MILLION! That is one of the watersheds of which Pebble Project is at the headwaters of.

Yeah, I know, Art. Prepositions and sentence ends...

I'm not clueless. I live on the edge of its so-called potential disaster zone.

As if...

So basic Physics is not your thing, nor mining history...

Stevelyn does have a point.. The left preservationist attitude is not the only thing we have to be wary about. Trump's exuberance for development, without ground level cognizant in specific instances, such as Pebble, is something that can bite us big time. In this case Pebble!

Keep in mind that the source of wealth comes from only two sources: Agriculture in all it's forms, or mineral extraction in all it's forms.

Agriculture is self renewing if done right. Mineral extraction is a one time thing. Fk up the ag for mineral extraction and it is lose/lose in the long run.

No. I prefer to allow the legally designed process to run itself to its conclusion and I'm not convinced the anti-Pebble opposition is being truthful given their L48 fahq support.

The part where Frank was clearly breaking every rule by allowing the use of maritime forms to detail game and fish assets in the area does not bother your sense of the rule of law? And you want to point fingers?

Please detail a single lie from the anti-Pebble side. Surely you have some obvious examples seeing how the Outside interests are so heinous in their actions.

I have not seen a significant example and I spent a great deal of time being paid to research the project...

I can give you hundreds of significant examples of lies from the pro-Pebble side.

Gosh, I wonder how they mined all that copper out of the Wrangells a hundred years ago without killing all the salmon in the Copper River.

No earthen dam of any significant size, no overburden of incredible volume, no arsenic heap leaching, no peat sponge 3,500 feet thick to compress with the World's largest earthen dam, built on bedrock, very high grade ore that was mostly hauled away, virtually all Copper River fish come from tributaries on the main stem...

Great question but very easy to answer and I could go on.

Sitka Deer: Are you a geologist? I am very interested in learning more about the potential for contamination and mining in AK, in general, as I am considering two potential summer opportunities in AK mining. Would you be willing to share some of your research with me, or at least point me in the direction of a few online resources? The problem I have run into is that almost everything I have read online is one-sided and written from an extreme environmentalist perspective. While I realize that the pro Pebble cadre has a vested interest in seeing the mine approved for development, so too, it seems, that the environmentalists seek to stop it by any means necessary. It also appears that the proposed Pebble mine is likely the most controversial in recent memory.

Should you be willing to educate me, please feel free to send me a PM. Thank you.

PM sent

I'm not buying that it just "can't be done." The solution is to find a way to do it that is safe. It looks like it's going to happen, so you may as well put your energy into that, rather than into preaching against it.

A mine of that type and scope, has NEVER been successfully done "safely". There's a lesson to be learned there. You sure as hell don't use an area like the Bristol Bay drainages as an experiment.

I'd like to add that supporting Pebble, just because the greenies are against it, is about as ignorant a position that I can imagine. A bad idea, is a bad idea. I don't give a [bleep] who is for or against it.

Jeff

And realize there are many very pro-development folks very against Pebble. Everything about the project is wrong...

Scooping out the tundra to 3500 feet to expose the bedrock to allow the largest earthen dam in the World to stick is just not a reasonable thing... and that really is required at minimum for it to be reasonable...

There is no green light to the project, the EPA had simply shut down the projects ability to go through the permit project and the recent announcement means (as far as I know) that the project can proceed to the permitting stage.

Could the project be done with 0 risk to the environment? In theory yes. Now will the project be profitable with those level of safeguards in place? I'm betting no.
So that leaves you with just enough safe guards to get the project permitted, but not enough for it to be truly safety.

I work in industrial safety. I can guarantee that risk mitigation is ultimately accepting that you've spent as much as you are willing to mitigate risks but you have not eliminated all of them and that you are accepting a certain number of employees will get injured and killed and a certain level of environmental damage will occur and there is a cost benefit analysis and acceptable risks. They never couch those calculations in those terms, but I can assure you that when the point is reached where an additional level of protection is costing billions, then some risks will be accepted.

Absolutely! I spent 2 months in Bristol Bay one summer.. I'm likely never to get back there.. Some experience/observation on the ground, but no dog, personally, in the fight.

"A bad idea, is a bad idea. I don't give a [bleep] who is for or against it."

This is one project that just should not be done at the current state of technology. Maybe in the future it can be "safely done", but I doubt it. As Art said, 3500 feet to bedrock is a bit deep.... and then there is the potential faults in the bedrock, and failure of dam potential... No one has yet built a 3500 foot dam to my knowledge- Aswan to date is the highest- no where near that, and has some problems....

Color me pessimistic all the way around.

Depending on the parameters chosen, they intend to build the biggest and second biggest dams in the World with another in the top ten , or simply the biggest dam in the world there... on a sponge.

I would still like to see Frank have to 'splain his moves in court...

The fact that pro use folks are against it tells the tale IMHO.

Some things, at this time, are not feasible or worth the risk... I've seen it in the oilfield and ya know... many years later you could do what used to not be safe or feasible.

Hopefully this one just craters on its own.