<\/p>\n
On a scorching July afternoon in 2016, Tesla founder Elon Musk unveiled his \u201cGigafactory,\u201d a massive complex outside Reno, Nevada, designed to stimulate green technology in the West. It\u2019s now mass-producing batteries to power electric cars, which directly emit none of the greenhouse gases of their combustion-engine counterparts.<\/p>\n
Electric cars, however, require about twice as much copper as conventional vehicles. So as demand for Tesla\u2019s products increases, so does demand \u2013 and prices \u2013 for the critical metal. That is playing out in a not-so-clean way in Yerington, just 60 miles from the gigafactory, where a new copper mine \u2013 financed by a Russian oligarch \u2013 is set to begin production this year.<\/p>\n
The Pumpkin Hollow copper deposit was first discovered in 1960 outside Yerington on a combination of private and federal lands. In 2005, Canada-based Nevada Copper acquired it. Five years later, the deposit\u2019s \u201coutstanding potential\u201d piqued the interest of Russian billionaire Vladimir Iorich, founder of Pala Investments, which soon became Nevada Copper\u2019s largest shareholder.<\/p>\n
In 2015, a congressional defense spending bill transferred approximately 9,000 acres of federal land to Nevada Copper by way of the city of Yerington, which zoned it for mining and eased the way for expedited permitting through the state.<\/p>\n
Pumpkin Hollow is expected to be an economic boon; Nevada Copper says it will initially employ approximately 300 people and pay both property tax and a net proceeds tax to the city. It will be \u201cthe soul of the community,\u201d said Yerington Mayor George Dini. \u201cOur town right now is a community that can be described as kind of sleepy. \u2026 We do agriculture, and we like mining.\u201d<\/p>\n
But for those who are still grappling with contamination from the Anaconda Copper Mine on the edge of town, which shut down in 1978, it\u2019s not worth it. Over its six decades of operation, the Anaconda Mine contaminated groundwater and the Walker River \u2013 which is just several hundred feet from the mine\u2019s gaping pit \u2013 with arsenic, copper, zinc, lead and cadmium. In 2011, hundreds of Yerington residents filed a class-action suit, accusing ARCO and its owner, BP America, of leaking toxic metals into soil and groundwater for decades and covering up the contamination\u2019s extent. They received nearly $20 million in a 2013 settlement, but in 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency deferred listing the mine as a Superfund site, instead giving oversight to the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur concern is that the fervor for jobs is going to overwhelm important concerns of environmental and long-term management concerns,\u201d said John Hadder, executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, a nonprofit environmental justice organization. \u201cWe\u2019re concerned that the (Pumpkin Hollow) project is going to result in long-term pollution of \u2026 the water supply leading to a perpetual problem like we\u2019ve seen at the Anaconda mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fact that the new project is driven by foreign cash is hardly comforting. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to forget the global nature of projects like this,\u201d said Ian Bigly, the mining justice organizer for nonprofit The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. (Disclosure: High Country News board member Bob Fulkerson is the development director and co-founder of PLAN.) \u201cWhile Pumpkin Hollow will bring jobs to the community, most of the payouts from this project will benefit people far away from the town of Yerington while the town is left with some of the more devastating and lasting consequences from mining.\u201d<\/p>\n
Foreign investments have long fueled resource extraction in the West. Because Nevada Copper gets more than half its financing from Pala Investments, Pala \u2013 and Iorich \u2013 can dictate the selection of Nevada Copper\u2019s board of directors. \u201cNevada Copper can\u2019t claim this is a project for the community,\u201d Bigly said. \u201cThe community hasn\u2019t had much say at all in how Pumpkin Hollow was designed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iorich founded Pala Investments to cash in on \u201cgreen tech\u201d metals like copper, which are needed not only for electric cars, but also for hybrids, wind turbines and other green applications. \u201cThe copper industry needs areas of good supply with low political risk, and that\u2019s what we get in the United States,\u201d said Pala spokesman Stephen Gill.<\/p>\n
Now, nearly a decade after getting its first permit, the Pumpkin Hollow project will begin mining copper from both an underground and open-pit mine. Four other Western copper projects are expected to move forward this year, partly owing to the metal\u2019s rising cost.<\/p>\n
For some Yerington residents and members of the nearby Walker River Paiute Tribe, it\u2019s a frightening echo of a toxic past, one that still persists. Recent tests have shown increased levels of copper mining pollutants \u2013 beryllium, cadmium, lead and selenium \u2013 in the groundwater. Peggy Pauly, who formed a citizen advocacy group in 2004 to address the groundwater contamination from the Anaconda copper mine site, told Audubon<\/em> magazine this year: \u201cWe\u2019re concerned our water will never be clean again.\u201d<\/p>\n Paige Blankenbuehler is an assistant editor for High Country News.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" clean cars is causing an uptick in copper mining in the West, but at what cost?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":94623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5742,5735],"tags":[239],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-94622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-news","tag-mining"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94622"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=94622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}