TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Toronto- and New York-listed Northern Dynasty Minerals recently again criticised the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA’s) release of a revised draft of the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment (BBWA) report originally released last spring, noting that the new report failed to correct the central flaw that critics had agreed invalidated the original and revised study.

"You simply cannot assess the effects of a mining project that has not been proposed, and for which key engineering solutions, environmental safeguards and site-specific mitigation factors have not been provided," Northern Dynasty president and CEO Ron Thiessen said on Friday.

Northern Dynasty is a 50% owner of the Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP) with Anglo American, and aspires to construct the Pebble copper/gold/molybdenum mine, in Alaska.

Thiessen added the EPA had made “some effort” to address the “myriad” errors of fact, methodology and design that professional peer reviewers and other commentators catalogued with regard to the original BBWA draft last year, and it would take some time to assess those efforts.

"But let's be clear - the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment process is fatally flawed, and should have no bearing on the future development of one of America's most important strategic mineral resources,” Thiessen said.

The EPA started the BBWA in February 2011, to assess the potential effects of future development, including mining, on the land, people and resources of 64 373 km² in south-west Alaska. After narrowing the scope of its exercise on several occasions to focus mainly on the hypothetical development of the Pebble deposit, the EPA received widespread criticism from a panel of independent peer reviewers - who called the EPA's efforts to evaluate the effects of a 'hypothetical mining scenario' on the water, fish, wildlife and cultural resources of Bristol Bay "inadequate," "premature," "unreasonable," "suspect" and "misleading."

Thiessen noted that concerns previously expressed by stakeholders in Alaska and elsewhere about the federal agency rushing the process and providing inadequate opportunities for public scrutiny and involvement only seemed to be growing. The State of Alaska, Alaska's federal delegation and a majority of Alaska Native Regional Corporations criticised the EPA last year for providing inadequate opportunities for public involvement.

"Last year, EPA was criticised for providing a short 60-day public review period right in the middle of Alaska's fishing season, for holding its initial public hearings about an Alaska issue in Seattle, and for providing inadequate opportunities for Peer Reviewers to consider public input. This time around, the public comment period has been cut in half, there will be no public meetings and there will be zero opportunities for stakeholders to engage with the independent peer review panel.

“If the lack of transparency and opportunity for public involvement in this process was a problem before, it's an even bigger problem today,” Thiessen warned.

Thiessen added that the EPA had been criticised for refusing to fully comply with information requests from three different Congressional committees in Washington DC, and had not answered basic questions about how much money was spent on the assessment. The EPA also allegedly funded as many as six secret 'peer review' studies of third-party reports related to mineral development in south-west Alaska to validate the misleading conclusions reached in the initial draft of the allegedly ill-advised BBWA.

"For the BBWA or any other study undertaken in the public interest to be credible, it must not only apply the best available science and scientific methodologies, it must also be seen to be fair, open and balanced," Thiessen said.

"I think the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment has failed on all counts. As a result, the only appropriate path going forward is for EPA to shelve this flawed study and allow Pebble to be assessed under the well-established National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) permitting process."

Under previous EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, agency officials had expressed the view that the EPA held legal authority under Section 404c of the Clean Water Act to pre-emptively veto development projects it solely deemed to have unacceptable effects.

A majority of legal commentators have dismissed that view, and Thiessen said he was confident that future decisions about Pebble would be made by federal and state regulators working within the well established and understood NEPA permitting process.

"Whether EPA chooses to spend valuable manpower and taxpayer dollars completing the BBWA report or not, we are confident that a comprehensive mine development proposal presented by the Pebble Partnership - including state-of-the-art strategies to protect important water, fish, wildlife and cultural resources - will ultimately be judged by federal and state regulators against the rigorous environmental standards of Alaska and the United States," he said, adding that PLP's goal was to trigger permitting under NEPA later this year.

"Pebble is among the most important mineral development projects in the world today, with the potential to create thousands of US jobs, billions of dollars in annual economic activity, and the strategic minerals necessary to supply American manufacturing over decades of production. It is too important a project to have its future dictated by a fatally flawed and clandestine study, and I'm confident that the incoming EPA administrator will share that view," he said.