Alaskans Weigh the Cost of Gold

The effort is led by Northern Dynasty Minerals, a Vancouver company that signed a partnership this summer with global mining giant Anglo-American to develop the site on the peninsula between Cook Inlet and Bristol Bay, 180 miles southwest of Anchorage.

The joint effort will spend almost $100 million this year on exploratory drilling and consultants hired to prepare an environmental impact statement that starts the permitting process. Though the mine itself remains years from reality, the priority is hiring. So far, about one-third of the 150 people working at Pebble's local headquarters in the village of Iliamna are natives from the surrounding area.

"It's all about getting the 'social license,' " said one Northern Dynasty manager, using industry jargon for obtaining permission of the local community, and speaking privately because the company authorized only Magee to be quoted.

"It's not rape and pillage anymore. It can't be."

By all appearances it's an uphill battle. A recent survey by Bristol Bay Native Corp., which under federal law represents 8,000 natives with roots in the area, found 69 percent oppose the mine, 57 percent "strongly."

The problem is salmon. Wild sockeye course through the bay and famously surge up the rivers that converge exactly where geologists found rich deposits of gold and copper.

"I can't imagine a worse location for a mine of this type, unless it was in my kitchen," Jay Hammond, who was governor of Alaska from 1974 to 1982 and died in 2005, once said. With commodity prices soaring, Magee said the find constitutes "one of the most important ore bodies in the world today." But mining it all would involve crushing 8 billion tons of rock to extract the mere 0.6 percent that is ore. The other 99.4 percent would be piled as tailings in a massive embankment that must be kept covered with water, lest the extractive chemicals react with air to create sulfuric acids that would carry heavy metals downstream.

"Heavy metals and fish generally don't mix, and copper is one of the most toxic heavy metals to fish," said Carol Ann Woody, a fish biologist who until last year worked for the federal government.

Woody said new research shows that tiny increases in copper levels -- a couple of parts per billion -- can wipe out a salmon's olfactory senses. The fish use their sense of smell to distinguish predator from prey and, crucially, to find their way to the streams where they are adapted to spawn.

"So you wouldn't know your home," Woody said. It would "be like walking into your grandma's kitchen and it smells like the dentist's."

The risk made an instant opponent of Alaska's commercial fishermen who harvest the firm, flaky wild fish considered superior to farmed salmon. The threat to the $325 million-a-year industry also made an opponent of the most powerful Alaska politician, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R), who is normally ardently pro-development.

Also alarmed are about 50 lodges that fly in sport fishermen who pay as much as $1,200 a night.