Environmental Justice

January 30, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Reactors, Bankrupting their Owners, Closing Early

On January 22, FirstEnergy Corporation announced that its faulty and nearly-self-destructed Davis-Besse power reactor east of Toledo, Ohio, will be closed well before its license expires. However, the shutdown is not because the reactor represents reckless endangerment of public health and safety and should have been closed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. FirstEnergy was fine with spinning the loaded gun. No, the old rattle trap can’t cover its costs any more, not with the electricity market dominated by cheaper natural gas, wind, and solar.

Davis-Besse’s shutdown date has not been announced, but CFO James Pearson of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., the corporate division in charge of the wreck, said it will close if lawmakers don’t approve a taxpayer bailout.

FirstEnergy had said the financial sky was falling in March 2017. Chief nuclear officer Sam Belcher [his real name] told the Toldeo Blade then — as the firm was floating the bailout measure (SB 128) through the Ohio legislature — “In the absence of something happening, [taxpayer-funded handout to the private, investor-owned firm] we’re going to have to make some tough decisions.” So far, state lawmakers have refused to save the decrepit reactor with state taxes. They cite old-fashioned market competition, and the failure of previous subsidies to save the mature, well-established reactor industry once led by the now bankrupt Westinghouse.

Serious accidents at David-Besse in 1977, 1985, 1998, and 2002 endangered its neighbors. The most hair-raising was the discovery in 2002 that corrosion had eaten through more than 6-inches of the reactor head’s carbon steel. The corrosion went undetected by federal and company inspectors for decades. Having gouged a hole in the reactor cover the size of a football, the corrosion left only 3⁄8 inch of steel holding back the high-pressure coolant. A break would have caused a massive loss-of-coolant accident and out-of-control overheating, resulting in catastrophic uranium fuel melting (known as a “meltdown”) and massive radiation releases.

Repairs took two years and cost $600 million, during which the Department of Justice penalized FirstEnergy over operating and reporting violations. FirstEnergy paid $28 million in fines. Yet the NRC allowed the company to restart David-Besse in 2004, and then to run the rust bucket for 40 reckless years, even after the company tacked on another $600 million in repairs in 2014.

With combined debt estimated at $3.5 billion and losses mounting daily, CFO Pearson said FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. will file for bankruptcy. Not just Davis-Besse, but the firm’s Perry reactor northwest of Cleveland, and Beaver Valley reactors 1 & 2, northwest of Pittsburg, will also likely be closed.

Reactors Shuttered by Bankruptcy or Accident Risk from Calif. to New Jersey

Elsewhere in nuclear power’s long “goodbye,” California utility regulators decided this January 11 not to save Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) from cheap gas, solar and wind, but to close the company’s two reactors at Diablo Canyon as early as 2020. Unlike the bribe-happy legislatures in New York and Illinois, nuclear power defenders were unable to convince California state law makers to fund a bail out of PG&E.

In 2013, Southern Calif. Edison, owners of the San Onofre reactors north of San Diego, abruptly decided to close them. Reactors 2 and 3 have been churning out high-level radioactive waste since 1983 and 1984 respectively. The hulks ran into trouble when massive repairs and upgrades failed inspections. In May that year, US Sen. Barbara Boxer said that the reactors were “unsafe and posed a danger to the 8 million people living within 50 miles. Boxer even called for a criminal investigation into Edison’s installation of faulty replacement steam generators.

The list of old age reactors shut down or closing soon keeps growing. Kewaunee in Wisconsin was shut in 2013, Vermont Yankee in 2014, and Fort Calhoun in Nebraska in 2016. Oyster Creek* in New Jersey will close at the end of this year, and Pilgrim* in Massachusetts will close in 2019 or sooner. Indian Point’s 1 and 2 near New York City will be shuttered by 2021. Exelon Corp’s FitzPatrick* near Oswego, New York, FE Ginna in Ontario, NY and its nearby Nine Mile Point* were all set to close in 2017, before the state legislature agreed to a $7.6 billion bailout. (This bailout law is being challenged in court by Nuclear Information and Resource Service whose lawsuit has survived its first motion to dismiss.) Exelon’s Clinton and Quad Cities* reactors in Illinois, might have shut down last year too, except for a state taxpayer bailout worth $3.5 billion adopted in 2016.

New reactor construction is being thwarted by similarly exorbitant costs. In 2016, two unfinished Bellefonte reactors in northern Alabama were cancelled. The two V.C. Summer reactors that were almost 40% complete in South Carolina were cancelled last July by its owners after the industry-shocking bankruptcy of the projects’ lead contractor Westinghouse Electric.

Next among dozens of shaky reactors on the chopping block, Xcel Energy’s 43-year-old Monticello* unit on the Mississippi River in Minnesota looks vulnerable, especially in view of a string of notorious accidents.

* These units are elderly clones of the General Electric “Mark I” reactors that caused a triple melt-down at Fukushima in Japan which began in March 2011 and continues to spread radiation to the atmosphere and to the Pacific Ocean. — John LaForge

December 21, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Presents Wrapped-up for Polluters & Arms Dealers

Federal Christmas presents are being lavished on toxic polluters, arms merchants, billionaires, and their Congressional lap dogs, while, as Zappa said, the meek shall inherit nothing.

As if pollution and graft made the country great, the Trump administration, with help from liberal Democrats, has been on a regulation-cancelling rampage, repealing rules on environmental protection, health care, financial services, and even internet accessibility. As of Dec. 15, Mr. Trump’s government-by-industrialists had revoked 67 rules, withdrawn 635 planned regulations, declared 244 rules “inactive,” and “delayed” 700 others.

Here at home, Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Crosby, managed to giftwrap for a foreign mining company the cancellation of an environmental study of mining in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The US Forest Service had been examining environmental risks of several large mining proposals near the BWCA.

The giant Antofagasta Corporation from Chile wants to dig a massive underground copper mine southeast of Ely near the Kawishiwi River which flows directly into and through the protected boundary waters. If the study had a chance of finding little risk of permanent mine pollution, Nolan and the billionaire Chileans would have allowed it to proceed. But copper mines always wreck surface and groundwater, so mine proponents zeroed out the study, and, voila, its absence makes the plan look clean as hell.

Nolan and Rep. Tom Emmer also handed copper interests the repeal of a temporary ban on mining near the cherished wilderness. In related pollutionism, Congress also revoked a law that penalized coal mining for destroying area streams.

Budget Cuts for the Least of These

Meanwhile, the Republicans’ October budget provides nuclear weapons systems with hundreds of billions, while gouging $1 trillion from Medicaid and nearly $500 billion from Medicare. The government intends to spend about $40 billion every year for nine years on nuclear weapons programs, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s report “Projected Costs of US Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2026.” Plans put forward by the Pentagon and the Energy Department would cost $400 billion over this period.

Of the $400 billion, the CBO estimates that Congress will approve $189 billion for new long-range jet bombers, long-range land-based missiles, and ballistic missile submarines; $9 billion for new short-range nuclear bombs and missiles; $87 billion for national laboratories that design and produce the new warheads, missiles and bombs; and $58 billion for nuclear war communications and warning systems. The remaining $56 billion of the $400 billion estimate is the CBO’s idea of likely cost overruns.

These estimates include the projected costs of new weapons that aren’t yet approved. Funds for a new long-range, land-based missile to replace today’s 450 have not been appropriated (and high-ranking military and civilian authorities have publicly attacked the plan saying they should be abolished, not replaced). The Long-range Stand Off missile — a nuclear-armed Cruise missile — has also been called unnecessary and destabilizing by former Secretaries of Defense and other experts. Still, both systems are expected by the CBO to see development take off in the coming years.

Senate Finance Committee Chair: “We don’t have money anymore”

While debating the Republican’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT, spoke about the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which needs $15 billion (its appropriation expired last Oct. 1). CHIP subsidizes exams, doctor visits, prescriptions and other health care for children in 9 million low-income families across the country.

Hatch actually said: “[L]et me tell you something: … the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore.” As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Hatch just gave away 100 times the CHIP budget in a tax cut that aids high-income industrialists.

Navy submarines that fire long-range nuclear weapons are called Trident subs and the military wants to replace them all. The CBO report says that about $90 billion over 10 years should cover the cost of two new subs and plans for a third.

With Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs, the plan was to spend $43 billion over 10 years to make changes to the current missiles. But with plans for an all-new missile, former Sec. of Defense William Perry has said it will cost $100 billion.

An all-new long-range heavy jet bomber (sometimes alarmingly dubbed the “China bomber”) may cost $43 billion over 10 years. But then since “we don’t have money anymore,” the program may have to be renamed “Medicaid” or “Medicare” so that its budget can be trimmed. — John LaForge

December 14, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

America is Hard to Find

By JOHN HEID

When I was 13 my mother announced to me: “I want you to meet your elderly Aunt Mary before she dies.” Without further discussion mother sent me off to Glassport, Penn. for a weekend visit. I’d never met Aunt Mary, and all I knew was that she didn’t speak a lick of English—and I no Polish. I was not fired up about spending the weekend with her. Following mother’s orders none the less, off I went on the Greyhound for three days that keep coming to mind every time the burning matter of immigration flares up.

I fell into the rabbit hole of culture shock meeting the Ruthkowski side of my otherwise very German family. These folks were a passel of blood relatives who spoke differently, kept their homes differently, and cooked differently than in my house. And I had the time of my life, language barriers notwithstanding. We were family, tho’ culturally miles apart. Without saying a word of English, Aunt Mary opened windows in my mind, and widened, if just a bit, my view of what America looks like.

Flash forward a couple decades to Baltimore in the mid ‘80s. I was serving 6 months in a federal halfway house on the far east side of the city. Every inmate was required to work outside the facility and I was granted permission to do my work hours as a volunteer at Viva House, the Catholic Worker several miles across town. Four days a week I would peddle across the city on my bicycle through neighborhoods I never knew existed, let alone been in. I recall hearing language after language flowing through the open windows into the sultry, summery streets of Baltimore as I passed by. And the fragrances coming from the kitchens linger in my taste buds. Each neighborhood unique. One city. Many cultures. Side by side.

Every time I see somebody wearing a cap that reads “Make America Great Again” a tidal wave of questions arise. What is America? Who is American? Who am I looking at? Where am I looking? And when, if ever, was it great? When wasn’t it?

For starters the term “America” is an incomplete, specious, and culturally challenged moniker for the United States. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, writes in An Indigenous Peoples’ History Of The United States: “I refrain from using ‘America’ and ‘American’ when referring to the United States and its citizens. Those blatantly imperialistic terms annoy people in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, who are, after all, also Americans.”

The Earth has just gone full circle around the sun since the last US presidential election. I call 2017 the year of the looking glass, which culminates years of navel gazing. The deep rifts in the core values of our nation have been exposed. They are in our face. The comeuppance was inevitable. These differences didn’t happen overnight, any more than earthquakes do. The tectonic plates of sociological structures move slowly, often imperceptibly. Voices at the edge have been warning us for decades—even longer, from the beginning. Our history celebrates and haunts us; mostly from the closet. Now we’re face to face with ourselves. The emperor’s clothes lie scattered on the ground, alongside ours. And our national wounds are exposed to the light of day.

“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame and so ugly.” —James Baldwin, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Notes,” The Cross of Redemption

I believe that self-education is a worthy first step to unraveling our national identity crisis. Or better said, we need to undo the single course menu of US history we’ve been spoon fed from the get go. In his 1963 “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin wrote: “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has said about it.”

A worthy remedial education course could begin with Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History, Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States, Kim E. Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States. Not to mention Howard Zinn’s masterpiece A People’s History of the United States.

Then comes the disciple of critical listening. And to whom shall we listen? How about First Nations people for openers? Those who were here before the conquest, before there was a United States. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History, Willie Johns, from Brighton Seminole Reservation in Florida says, “We are here to educate, not forgive. We are here to enlighten, not accuse.”

In poetic form Langston Hughes weighs in: “Say, who are you that mumbles in the back? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? / I am the poor white fooled and pushed apart, / I am the negro bearing slavery’s scars. / I am the red man [sic] driven from the land, / I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek– / And finding the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. / Let America Be America Again” (an excerpt)

The task of remembering rounds out the prescription for our identity dilemma. Angela Davis reminds us, “We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.”

Re-membering is, after all, simply putting together the myriad stories of all those who inhabit this land thereby exposing and breaking through the cycle of cultural amnesia.

Where do we go from here? There are no quick fixes. No one-size-fits-all legislation. A change in Administrations in and of itself does not interrupt the status quo of colonization and its subsequent repression. Revolution? Isn’t that what got us here in the first place? Perhaps, what is needed is a revolution of heart, as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker said.

“O let America be America again– / The land that never has been yet– / And yet must be–the land where every man [sic] is free. / The land that’s mine–the poor man’s [sic], Indians, Negroes, ME” —Langston Hughes

I can imagine my beloved Aunt Mary smiling over a platter of steaming homemade pierogis smothered in buttered onions saying, “Eat and you will eventually understand.” #####

December 14, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

What Kind of Nuclear Attack Would be Legal?

US General Says Order To Launch Nuclear Weapons Can Be Refused If Illegal —Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18; US Nuclear Commander Would Balk at Any “Illegal” Order —MSNBC, Nov. 18; General Heading Strategic Command Says Illegal Nuclear Launch Order Can Be Refused —NBC News, Nov. 18; Top General Says He Would Resist “Illegal” Nuke Order From Trump —CBS News, Nov. 18; Top US General Says He Would Resist Illegal Nuclear Strike Order From Donald Trump —The Independent, Nov. 18.

These headlines all give the impression that a nuclear attack could be legal in some circumstances. But is this possible? Worried about what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president’s moronic understanding of nuclear weapons, two US generals have testified that they could disobey his orders to attack with nuclear weapons if they were unlawful. The question is: What kind of nuclear attack would be legal?

Air Force General John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, told the Halifax International Security Forum Nov. 18, that an order from the president to launch nuclear weapons can be refused if that order is determined to be illegal. Four days earlier, retired General Robert Kehler, who previously held Gen. Hyten’s top job at Strategic Command, testified likewise to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying that nuclear war commanders could “ignore any unlawful order by the president to launch a nuclear strike.”

Generals Hyten and Kehler both said in their unprecedented public comments that the legal principles of “military necessity,” “discriminate destruction,” and “proportionality” all apply to decisions about nuclear attacks. Senator Ben Cardin, D-MD, asked Gen. Kehler if he meant that Strategic Command could disobey a president’s order for a nuclear attack. “Yes,” Kehler said.

Legal scholar George Delf scolded military and civilian authorities who practice this “conventionalization” of nuclear weapons, talking as if they were conventional bombs and munitions. In Humanizing Hell: The Law V. Nuclear Weapons, Delf wrote, “There is something incongruous about lawyers who spend their working week concerned with routine [matters], and a few spare hours arguing against mass murder and the destruction of civilization.”

Saying military officers “could” disobey or “can” refuse unlawful orders understates the case. US military service manuals explicitly require military personal to refuse illegal orders. Everyone sworn in to the service is taught that disobeying illegal orders is mandatory, following them is a crime grounds for court martial. As CNN reported, “Under US military law troops are obligated to not obey an unlawful order. If they received such an order, they could resign or force Trump to fire them.” The point was made during last year’s presidential campaign, when Trump promised to illegally torture prisoners, kill the families of suspected militants, and bomb civilians. CNN reported then that “Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook noted on [Nov. 17, 2016] that all US troops have an obligation not to follow illegal orders.”

Certain Weapons Effects Always Unlawful

More importantly, there is a startling absurdity and a shocking ignorance in these public nuclear war conversations because any use of nuclear weapons would be indiscriminate and therefore illegal by definition. Only the uninitiated, uninformed or willfully blind can still imagine that nuclear weapons could be used “proportionately” to produce more military good than evil. The uncontrollable, unlimited, and unfathomable magnitude of nuclear weapons effects have been established as unlawful in countless text books, law journals, government studies and independent analyses.

Any use of nuclear weapons would be illegal because international treaties, protocols covenants, and agreements, as well as military field manuals, forbid indiscriminate destruction, attacks that are disproportionate to a military objective, and weapons’ effects that “wound treacherously,” or harm neutral states, or do long-term damage to the environment.

In her book Thermonuclear Monarchy Professor Elaine Scarry of Harvard reminds us that as long ago as 1995, Sweden, Iran and Egypt argued before the International Court of Justice that since nuclear weapons cause disproportionate suffering, they are prohibited by the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg and the Geneva Protocols of 1925, 1949, and 1977. The Republic of the Marshall Islands argued then that using nuclear weapons would violate the 1907 Hague Conventions prohibiting weapons with effects that cross into neutral states. Both North Korea and India, neither of which possessed nuclear weapons in 1995, wrote to the World Court insisting that it judge them unlawful. India argued that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is illegal under the Charter of the United Nations and international “rules of proportionality.”

Charles Moxley, in his 813-page tome Nuclear Weapons & International Law, puts this list of treaty obligations in perspective: “Nuclear weapons are not illegal just because they violate these laws of war, as exhaustively proven in this volume. They are illegal because they cause widespread and indiscriminate destruction without promoting the purpose of war: resolving conflict … They are not weapons but only wanton machines of symmetric destruction.”

Physical Effects: “Complete ruin”

What the generals and the congressional bureaucrats fail to grasp or teach us to ignore is the vast difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, and that nukes cannot be used in war without killing hundreds of thousands of civilians—that is, without committing war crimes.

Moxley’s Nuclear Weapons & International Law reports that, “A nuclear detonation generates temperatures of 100 million degrees, while a dynamite explosive about 3000 degrees.” What this unimaginable heat does to cities is explained by Lynn Eden in her 2004 book Whole World on Fire. “Mass fire and extensive fire damage would occur in almost every circumstance in which nuclear weapons were detonated in a suburban or urban area. …damage from mass fire would extend two to five times farther than blast damage.”

In 1977, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons notes with understatement, “[P]ersons in buildings or tunnels close to ground zero may be burned by hot gases and dust entering the structure.” In its lengthy consideration of radiation effects, taken from the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, FEMA says in part, “Among them, apart from genetic effects, are the formation of cataracts, nonspecific life shortening, leukemia, other forms of malignant disease, and retarded development of children in utero at the time of the exposure.” As Ann Fagan Ginger noted in her book Nuclear Weapons are Illegal, “They continue to maim and kill long after they explode in a test or in a war.”

A mass fire or “firestorm,” Eden writes, is “the simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, which causes a great volume of air to heat, rise, and suck in large amounts of fresh air at hurricane speeds from the periphery,” Eden notes. “Within ten minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event—the development of a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. This fire would quickly increase in intensity. In a fraction of an hour it would generate ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212°F, 100°C). This would produce a lethal environment over a vast contiguous area.”

Eden’s research is worth quoting at length. “The first mass fire in history was created by allied incendiary raids at Hamburg on the night of July 27-28, 1943. Within 20 minutes, two of three buildings within an area of 4.5 square miles were on fire. In three to six hours, this fire so completely burned out an area of more than 5 square miles that the area was referred to by damage analysts as the ‘Dead City.’ Well-documented accounts describe wind speeds of hurricane force within the city. Air temperatures were calculated to be between four and five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hundreds of degrees above the temperature of boiling water. [Up to] 100,000 people were killed in the attack. A mass fire resulting from a modern nuclear weapon could be expected to burn out an urban or suburban area of considerably larger size in a similarly brief time.”

Delf’s Humanizing Hell is concise, bold, and direct: “[A]rmed forces are committed by military, domestic and international law not to attack non-combatants. Any government which adopts a defense policy implying such an attack is therefore inciting its own forces to commit war crimes on a gigantic and suicidal scale.” Our military forces should not just disobey such orders but refuse this unlawful incitement. — John LaForge

November 21, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Minnesota Must Stop Ignoring State & Federal Mining Laws

Acid mine drainage from an abandoned gold mining site in Kantishna Mining District, Denali National Park, Alaska.

Governor Mark Dayton told the St. Paul Pioneer in October that he supports the PolyMet copper sulfide mining proposal, “But they still have to meet the environmental permitting requirements.”

The governor’s qualified endorsement of the controversial PolyMet mining plan raises the question of which environmental requirements have to be met.

Chris Knopf, of Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, makes two crucial points in a Nov. 13 counterpoint in the Mpls StarTrib, “How the proposed PolyMet mine project would violate Minnesota regulations.” First, state law requires PolyMet to “permanently prevent substantially all water from moving through or over the mine waste,” after mine closure. But PolyMet’s plan is to leave mine waste in contact with water for hundreds of years. Second, PolyMet’s and the DNR’s own data, based on rock samples from the proposed site, project the amount of toxic heavy metals to be expected in the contaminated water after mine closure. But this research was set aside and ignored, while irrelevant data from a Yukon Territory mine was substituted — in order to minimize the amount of expected contamination. Tellingly, that mine’s water quality continues to deteriorate, yet state officials have allowed this dubious data switch to go unchallenged.

PolyMet’s plans, as outlined in its 2016 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), also appear to violate the federal Clean Water Act. Section 404 governing discharges into US waterways requires mining firms to use the “least environmentally damaging practicable alternative,” but this would mean underground extraction rather than open pits, and “dry stack tailings” of fine particle mine waste rather than PolyMet’s plan to dump slurry into unlined seepage ponds. Dry stacking is far less environmentally damaging since it doesn’t threaten groundwater contamination, but Paula Maccabee, an attorney for WaterLegacy, explains that PolyMet’s chose the cheaper options, not the least damaging, without adequate .

Maccabee submitted 80 pages of expert comment on the FEIS and she noted that the Clean Water Act also requires that PolyMet to make written guarantees regarding if and when company-funded cleanup programs will be conducted to fix unplanned “adverse impacts.”

Financial assurances and long-term guarantees

In October 2015, Governor Dayton said he wanted to hire an independent analysis of the financing behind the PolyMet Mining Corp. and its foreign owner, Glencore of Switzerland. Patrick Condon reported in the StarTribune that Dayton had “concerns” about Glencore whose environmental record was “mixed.” “That’s why I think the financial assurance part would be essential.”

That November Dayton followed up on his concerns, saying that if the giant mine was eventually permitted, Minnesota should demand “a rigorous system of community oversight,” like the one required of Upper Michigan’s Eagle mine which he visited that fall. The StarTribune’s Tony Kennedy reported that Dayton “was impressed by Michigan’s decision to require the [Eagle] mine’s owner to pay $300,000 annually into an independent oversight fund.”

As I reported here earlier, Michigan’s Eagle mine is 100 times smaller than the proposed PolyMet open pit. Dayton’s suggestion that Minnesota “should demand the same as Michigan,” means that PolyMet Mining Corp./Glencore should be required to pony up $30 million annually for independent, long-term ground water and surface water monitoring. If mine promoters like US Representative Rick Nolan, D-MN, are correct to predict that giant, open-pit sulfide deposits can be mined using “technological innovations that can mitigate mining’s environmental footprint” like acid mine drainage, then PolyMet/Glencore must guarantee it up front with legally binding agreements.

PolyMet’s own waste water modeling data initially stated that potential acid mine drainage would be a 500-year-long problem, so the water monitoring guarantee needs to amount to a guaranteed bond of $15 billion in today’s dollars.

Enter Phyllis Kahn, the long-time member of the Minnesota House. Kahn has raised the issue of paying for cleanup after the mine closes or following a pollution disaster. In a Nov. 14 letter to the StarTrib, Kahn points out that, historically “throughout the country,” after mine closure or a major mishap “the company goes belly up and the bank or financial institution backing it goes bankrupt.” To protect Minnesota’s water against this financial corruption, Kahn recommends that the state “require a bond issued by a reputable institution like Lloyd’s of London,” noting that the insurer’s refusal to offer a policy “or proposal of an unmeetabe rate” would speak volumes about the likelihood, severity and costs of the mine’s inevitable disasters. — John LaForge