Excavating the regulatory process and risks posed by Alaska hardrock mine expansions
A recent paper published in the journal FACETS features seven SMEA authors, titled Excavating the regulatory process and risks posed by Alaska hardrock mine expansions.
This paper represents the culmination of a SMEA capstone project! We hope it will be of interest to a broad audience, including NEPA practitioners, applied scientists, and citizens that current or future mining operations may impact. For experienced NEPA wonks, we hope this paper will provide interesting details on the intricacies of each expansion process. For those less familiar with NEPA, this paper will provide an informative overview of the NEPA process.
Synopsis
As a general rule, industrial mining operations expand over time. The expansion of a mine’s footprint and infrastructure is an important consideration for accurately assessing the environmental risk, yet the process by which an expansion moves through the regulatory process is not always consistent or clear-cut. We present five detailed case studies to describe how the regulatory processes associated with mining expansions in Alaska can vary widely depending on the geographic and institutional contexts.
Key results
Our results amplify the findings from an increasing number of studies on the public process around mining. Some mine expansions can be quite small and go through an extensive public process, while some very substantial expansions may be approved with limited to no public process. Common themes across our case studies included differing levels of public engagement, varying approaches to cumulative effects analyses, and difficulties accessing public documents. These differences are related, in some cases, to land ownership and jurisdictional differences among mining operations.