SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2006 COMMENT GREEN VALLEY NEWS & SUN A7
Thursday´s APP hearing: One more step on a long road
By Dick Kamp
It is useful to think of the Aquifer Protection Permit (APP) hearing this Thursday, 9:30 a.m. at the Canoa Hills Center, as a limited tool in a state mining regulatory arsenal that is week.
This is a permit that has been under negotiation for 21 years.
If you wish to protect Green Valley water for 100 years or more, the current proposed permit is not going to do it.
If, however, you attend the hearing with an intent to join with your neighbors in strengthening the permit, you still have a chance to succeed.
This newspaper has documented the efforts in Green Valley, the most focused in Arizona, to protect local groundwater aquifers and the Santa Cruz Valley from impacts of the Phelps Dodge Sierrita and Duval mines.
Local groups and individuals and Community Water Company of Green Valley (CWCGV) have created regulatory pressure and Phelps Dodge has negotiated some unresolved means to “mitigate” sulfate pollution to no more than 250 milligrams per liter.
Mitigate is generally interpreted as meaning to halt pollution and doing something to reduce it. It is not as strong as remediation, or cleanup. However, this mitigation plan seems clear in not calling for the sulfate plume to be halted or imposing any pollution reduction requirement.
Alternative sources of water may be a “solution” – they should not be.
Pollution transport in groundwater is rarely well understood. Although PD does not need until June 2008 (or longer), as called for in the mitigation order, to produce a plan for defining sulfate pollution, the goal of that report should be to both define sulfate plumes and define how to truly stop its movement.
This means maintaining wells at the outside perimeter of the mine property at below 250 mg/l, and determining long-range strategies to remove both sulfates and uranium from groundwater.
Examine work plan
The workplan for characterizing the sulfate plume that is due Aug.15 should be carefully examined by the public and the APP comment period should allow until at least Oct. 15 for public comment to address the substance of it.
Uranium, and other radioactive compounds such as gross alpha, should join sulfate as substances requiring a detailed study of behavior in groundwater.
Furthermore, to the extent that both sulfate and uranium pollution might require true mitigation strategies, these strategies should be implemented within the enforceable APP and not solely in a separate mitigation order.
The enforcement penalties in the mitigation order max out at a weak $8,000 dollars a day after 60 days.
Uneasy picture
EPA and local community water studies present an uneasy picture of uranium and radionucleides almost certainly influenced by mining discharges into groundwater.
Uranium and radionucleides exceeded EPA standards at one well, and CWCGV has found that in closed wells 7 and 8 where sulfates are rising, radionucleides are creeping up.
Uranium, like sulfates, is chemically known as an “anion.” At more than one copper mine, they have behaved somewhat like sulfates in groundwater, showing up many years before other pollutants might.
‘Unwanted canaries’
Both substances are unwanted canaries in copper mining wastes letting you know more problems could be ahead unless halted.
The APP should unequivocally tell the public how radionucleides and uranium compounds may be impacting groundwater in Green Valley.
Although they may be, these compounds are not frequently naturally high in background wells in the area.
Other shortcomings of this APP that citizens might want to raise include the need for a comprehensive
listing of chemicals, uranium and radionucleides and other substances in the tailings or elsewhere present at the mine that could impact groundwater.
We cannot know what to monitor for without knowing what has the potential for entering the groundwater.
Monitoring requirements in the wells include some known oil and gas pollutants but do not include other solvents that may have been used, nor chemicals known as fluctuants that are part of the flotation process in Sierrita concentrators.
The big picture
Back to the big picture here. This APP is valid until the mine closes and the bonding for closure and post-closure costs of the mine—and closure means centuries—stands at under $4 million plus $280,000 a year thereafter.
Why then, do closure and post-closure bonds for PD mines in New Mexico stand at numbers in the hundreds of millions of dollars—$390 million at the Chino mine alone?
The answer is that the New Mexico mining law has requirements that the mines sustainably protect the environment permanently and demonstrate how they cannot impact groundwater.
It may take many years to negotiate what exactly that means.
Arizona lacks such a law and the result is a permissive lack of environmental mining accountability.
Something unusual
On the bright side: PD has done something unusual that could pay for real measures needed to ensure that costly engineering changes, including actual water cleanup where necessary, or changing tailings angles and establishing true capping where needed, can be implemented at the Sierrita, Duval, and other Arizona mines.
In December of 2005 the company created an environmental trust valued, as of this past April, at $400 million dollars plus interest.
The company is doing well these days, and it is all over the world, but it can begin changing what cleanup and closure means in Arizona by doing two things: First, putting up more cash to protect Green Valley water— beyond paying for new wells—and second by joining efforts with other stakeholders to create an Arizona mining law that, like the New Mexican law, strives to truly protect the environment for a long, long time.
Dick Kamp is the Wick Communications environmental liaison, with more than 20 of experience working and reporting on environmental issues*. The opinions expressed above are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this newspaper.
Nancy's note: Especially hard-rock mining including Mexico and South America through his organization: Border Ecology. Return to Home Page
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