The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sharply criticized the draft environmental impact statement for the proposed PolyMet copper-nickel mine, agreeing with MCEA that the document is inadequate and also needs a specific financial assurance plan.

In its comments, dated Feb. 18, the agency also said that if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in particular, doesn’t dramatically improve the environmental review, the EPA may very well take the issue to President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality to resolve their differences.

“The EPA continues to identify the need to include financial assurance information in the environmental impact statement,” said Mary Marrow, MCEA staff attorney. “The failure of the PolyMet draft environmental impact statement to include this information is promising to cause delay from the potential involvement of the Council on Environmental Quality.

"A bill is currently under consideration by the Minnesota Legislature which would require financial assurance to be included as part of environmental review. By requiring financial assurance be included in the impact statement, delays which could result from the EPA referring this issue to the Council on Environmental Quality would be avoided.”

In its comments filed earlier this month, Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy stated that the draft impact statement was inadequate.  Among those reasons were the fact that the mining operation would lead to more mercury in fish, environmental review did not indicate how badly contaminated water would be treated centuries after the mine closed nor did it evaluate the safety of a plan to store the mine’s most toxic wastes on top of potentially unstable iron ore tailings left over from LTV Mining Co.

The EPA concurred with much of what MCEA said and was even more forceful on the need for detailed information on financial assurance, the damage deposit the mining company must pay for possible future clean-up before they turn over a single shovelful of dirt.

In addition, the EPA was more critical about the polluted water that would flow from the mining site into the Lake Superior watershed, indicating that they thought it was likely to have a greater potential for acid mine drainage than the company had suggested.

From the beginning, PolyMet has reassured everyone that they had a new technology which would prevent acid mine drainage that for the past 75 years or more have killed rivers and lakes, as well as the fish and animals that depend on them wherever sulfide mining has occurred in the United States. The EPA called that into question.

 “The project’s proposed operation and post-closure management plan for acid-generating waste rock and wastewater is inadequate and needs to be improved,” according to the EPA letter. “The proposed approaches to manage acid generation are untested or unproved at the proposed scale.”