An interesting story on the status of Polymet on the East Range from today’s Mesabi Daily News. Here’s the rather literary opening graphs from the Bill Hanna piece:
HOYT LAKES — The former LTV worker looked around the vastness of the crusher building, stunned by the eerie silence of a facility that she knew by its rumbling noise of production.
“It’s so quiet. It’s like it died,” she said to another former worker of the taconite plant that shuttered in 2000 during a tour last Thursday of the PolyMet plant site.
“It did,” the other worker said.
But the mining operation just north of Hoyt Lakes may soon come back to life, this time producing copper/nickel/precious metals rather than taconite pellets. PolyMet officials say they are set to go now — have been for some time — and are getting more and more frustrated by delay after delay in the environmental assessment process of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
This reminds me that I once wrote a short story based on the last shift of a shuttered Iron Range taconite plant. The ending was tragic, but did not include outrage over “delay after delay” in environmental review. I guess that’s why it was fiction, right? Anyway, when this hits “delay after delay after further appalling delay” we’ll start to worry.
Polymet is not the only player in the Babbitt copper/nickel/PGE game. Check out Franconiaminerals website for their Birch Lake project. From what I understand, they’ll be building everything from scratch.
Polymet may be getting jerked around, but last I read (about 2 years ago in the Star-Trib) was that Polymet had already cleared all the environmental assessments.
Could you run up another article explaining just what the state’s environmental concerns with Polymet are? Thanks in advance!