Western

State permits allowing water use by the proposed Donlin Gold mine face new legal challenges from opponents of the huge project in Southwest Alaska.

The most recent challenge was lodged on Monday, when two tribal governments appealed to the state Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision upholding state-issued permits. Those permits to withdraw water had been approved in April 2022 by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources; they were affirmed on Aug. 31 by Anchorage Superior Court Judge Dani Crosby.

The appeal of the ruling on the DNR permits follows a separate challenge to an Aug. 18 action by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation that certified the mine project as meeting state water quality standards. The department’s action renewed what is known as a 401 certificate, named after a section of the federal Clean Water Act. This certificate is required before a project can discharge wastewater, under the act.

The Orutsararmiut Native Council, one of the tribal governments involved in the appeal to the Supreme Court, filed a motion in state Superior Court on Sept. 11 that seeks to overturn the certification.

The Donlin Gold project, located about 145 miles northeast of Bethel, would be one of the biggest open-pit gold mines in the world. It has deposits estimated at 33.8 million ounces. Because it is located on Native land with Native-owned mineral rights, revenues would be shared among all Alaska Native corporations. But opponents argue that the mine would damage the ecosystem of the Kuskokwim River, including important salmon runs.

Those potential impacts are the reason for the legal challenges, the plaintiffs said in a statement released by Earthjustice, the environmental law organization representing them.

“The impacts from this proposed open pit mine, which would be the largest pure gold mine in the world, must be taken seriously and considered comprehensively,” Orutsararmiut Native Council Executive Director Brian Henry said in the statement.  “The State has an obligation to protect the Kuskokwim River and its tributaries from possible environmental damage caused by the Donlin Gold Mine. Our very existence and ways of life depend on it.

But state officials believe that agency actions have been proper.

“The state is confident that the Superior Court reached the correct result in affirming that DNR acted appropriately in approving Donlin’s water appropriation applications, and we look forward to defending the decision on appeal to the Supreme Court,” Department of Law spokesperson Patty Sullivan said by email.

As for the 401 certification, then-Commissioner Jason Brune, who issued the renewal, said in his Aug. 18 decision that the objections that Orutsararmiut Native Council raised – which concerned water temperature and young salmon — were outside the scope of the department’s consideration.

The mine permits being challenged are among numerous permits and approvals that have been issued for the project.

In addition to the new actions on the DNR and DEC permits, two other legal challenges are working their way through courts. One, from five tribes and the environmental group Cook Inletkeeper, is targeting the state right-of-way lease for a pipeline that would supply natural gas to the mine. That case is pending with the state Supreme Court. Another case, with six tribes as plaintiffs, is pending in federal court and challenging the authorizations granted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. That lawsuit was filed in April in the U.S. District Court in Alaska.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

A project to reestablish wood bison in Alaska suffered a setback last winter when harsh weather caused a major decline in the Lower Innoko and Yukon Rivers herd.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game wood bison biologist Tom Seaton says the latest population survey shows the herd dropped from about 150 to 72 animals over the last year. He attributes the decline to extreme winter weather, with heavy snow on the ground from last October through the end of this past May.

“It was just a bad combination of things: difficult snow to get through, to get to the forage,” Seaton said. “Snow that lasted a long time and snow that was quite deep.”

Seaton says the current population of 72 wood bison is the lowest since state, federal tribal partners working to reestablish the animals in Alaska transplanted 130 from Alberta, Canada in 2015. Another 28 Canadian animals were added in 2022.

But Seaton emphasizes that the herd has seen weather-driven fluctuations since 2015.

“Had a couple years of slow growth, then had a decline from around 140 to near 90 and then had a jump back over a hundred and then back down to ninety something,” he said. “Then a couple jumps above a hundred, all the way up to 150 last year, and then now down to 70-some.”

Meanwhile, planning continues to expand the effort to reestablish wood bison in Alaska. Seaton says the focus is on sites in the Eastern Interior, where snow cover tends to be lighter.

“So, Yukon Flats, lower Tanana drainage, and upper Tanana drainage — all have conditions that are more conducive to bison performance,” he said.

Seaton says they are working with local groups through a public planning process to identify a second wood bison restoration site where animals could be transplanted as early as next summer. The Wood Bison Restoration Project is paid for primarily with federal funds

The City of Nome and its partners are planning to build a demonstration home next summer – using a robot that prints concrete.

They hope the project will prove that the technology can slash the time and cost to build quality housing, even in Alaska’s most remote communities where it’s expensive to build and housing shortages are chronic.

The 3D printing system to build the home will come from 3,600 miles away, in Pennsylvania. Researchers and entrepreneurs working at Penn State University have built a prototype of the system. They’ll use it, or a newer version of it, in Nome to print the unfinished portions of an entire house.

“We are interested in printing everything: the foundation, the walls and the roofs by finding and developing the technology to print domes and vaults,” said Penn State architecture and engineering Professor Jose Duarte. He works in the university’s Additive Construction Lab and its spinoff business, X-Hab 3D.

Sending building materials and skilled workers off the road system is particularly expensive, and the short shipping and construction seasons further complicate the logistics. In some communities, materials must be over-wintered because there isn’t enough time to build after delivery.

Theoretically, 3D concrete printing systems have huge competitive advantages under rural Alaska’s construction constraints and logistics challenges.

Here’s why. Penn State’s system has three main pieces that all fit inside a 20-foot shipping container: A concrete mixer, a pump and a beefy, bright orange robotic arm with a 12-foot reach. The robot arm is mounted on a mobile platform.

“Our current system that we’ve designed at X-Hab 3D is a mobile expeditionary 3D concrete printer,” said Penn State engineering Professor Sven Bilén, who’s also on the team. “It’s on tank tracks. It’s able to roll out of the shipping container and then move around the site on those tank tracks.”

Once in place, the robot arm holds an extruder vertically, like a big pen, putting down a smooth, ropey stream of concrete in precise patterns. As the ropes stack up in layers, a three-dimensional form takes shape.

Without molds holding the soft concrete in place, it’s a bit of an engineering feat to get shapes to come out as intended, instead of a sagging, lopsided mess. Duarte said the system has to account for the particular properties of its concrete mix, how the concrete deforms as more is layered on top, even how the ambient temperature affects the curing time.

“So when you go to a place that is very cold, like, you know, the case of Alaska, or you go to a place that’s very hot, like the case of a desert, you change completely the environmental factors,” he said. “But if you have this platform, you can use the same type of rules, the same type of simulation analysis tools to find out what’s the best configuration for that type of environment. So in a nutshell, that’s the idea that we’re trying to explore.”

The Penn State team says it isn’t ready to share specifics about the project in Nome yet, but their past research was part of a 2021 feasibility study on 3D printed homes in rural Alaska. The study found a ton of benefits over traditional homebuilding.

Traditional builders would need one to three months to do what the 3D printing system could do in as little as one to three days.

A lot of the sand and gravel used in the different concrete mixtures can be locally sourced, which means huge time and cost savings, plus a lower carbon footprint.

The study says the homes should stand up to snow loads, frost heaves, extreme winds and earthquakes, and last longer with less maintenance than a regular home.

The cost savings are also potentially huge. Based on pre-pandemic Fairbanks market data, the researchers estimated that the shell of a concrete home would cost about one-fourth what a traditional one would.

And Duarte said because the different building elements are designed digitally, mass customization becomes possible. That’s good for aesthetics; buildings don’t have to be cookie cutter copies to keep costs down.

But there are practical benefits, too. Duarte said artificial intelligence can generate design options to fit specific build sites, individual families’ needs, the raw materials locally available and a range of expected weather.

“So you can actually customize the building materials for the performance,” Duarte said. “Because, when you have extreme conditions, it’s more difficult to find solutions that are satisfactory, and that’s why you need to use this technology. So we search to work for environments where the conditions were very difficult.”

A lot of eyes are on the Nome project. The Alaska Housing Finance Corp. and Denali Commission paid for the feasibility study.

“There’s really some Alaska-specific challenges to it,” said AHFC CEO Bryan Butcher. “But it’s really exciting to look and to see if it’s something we might be able to solve, because if we can build high energy efficiency homes in rural Alaska at an affordable price, it’s really going to be a game changer.”

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development recently awarded Nome and its partners a $600,000 grant for the demonstration build.

Nome is contributing land. City Manager Glenn Steckman shared his own housing situation. He rents an older, 900-square-foot house that he said “tilts a little bit” for $2,000 a month plus utilities.

“On top of that, Nome has been working to get people to either tear down old housing or to try to get it repaired,” Steckman said. “But some of the housing is past saving. So we just need to get more housing up here, and quality housing and safe housing. And that’s been a priority for the four years that I’ve been city manager in Nome.”

Steckman hopes the demonstration home will be the first of many. The city is expecting the demand for housing to only increase as construction on a port megaproject gets underway and medical facilities expand.

Bilén with Penn State said right now, the 3D concrete printing industry doesn’t really exist. His team’s origin story only goes back to 2015, when it came together to compete in a NASA challenge to develop 3D printed habitats for Mars. Here on Earth, building codes and regulatory agencies still have catching up to do.

But Bilén thinks the technology is poised for widespread commercialization, with applications far beyond housing. Like cable housings, sewers, even artificial reefs to mitigate coastal erosion.

“And as those applications grow, and more uses in this, I think you’re just gonna see 3D concrete printing explode,” Bilén said.

It has been more than a decade since researchers first announced that they’d found dinosaur footprints along the middle section of the Yukon River. And when that team did make their discovery public, they also said that it was unlikely that people who live along the river even knew dinosaur footprints littered the riverbanks near them.
But Nulato resident Rita Painter can prove them wrong.

“It was maybe about 30 to 35 years ago, and that’s when they had a fish wheel right down here,” Painter said.

Painter stands in her family’s long, aluminum boat near the riverbank at Halfway Camp, a fish camp about 12 miles downriver from Nulato. She tells the story of a large fossilized dinosaur footprint that had been found nearby.

“We were coming up from Grayling; they invited us to have some tea,” Painter said. “And while we were visiting with them, they showed us this rock. It was huge, and there was, like, a footprint on the rock.”

Painter said that the rock was maybe a foot or so wide and about 8 inches long.

“It was clearly a foot, but the toes looked different. And it was embedded in a rock,” Painter said.

Her husband, Dean Painter, said that the footprint had three toes.

The Painters told their story to three scientists who spent 16 days on the Yukon River in August. The team was hoping to find out more about the ancient reptiles and birds that once lived in this area.

The Painters’ description pretty accurately describes the footprint made by a bipedal, plant-eating dinosaur known as an ornithopod. And it’s helping the researchers meet their goal to better understand what locals know about the footprints.

Martha Turner grew up fishing along the span of riverbank where the Painters told the story of their dinosaur footprint encounter. It’s also a place where researchers found dozens of similar footprints. “Oh wow. That’s so cool. Like, our camp has all these dinosaur tracks,” said Turner when she heard Painter’s story.

Turner, who is Nulato’s tribal administrator, said that her grandmother, who was born at Halfway Camp, never mentioned any large, three-toed footprints to her before. Now she’s eager to ask about it.

In Kaltag, a village just over 30 miles downriver from Nulato, news that a research team was finding dinosaur tracks there this summer came as no surprise.

“Ever since we were this big, ever since we were 3-foot high we knew,” said Patrick “Paddy Bun” Madros Jr.

 

A small team of researchers is on the Yukon River this month to learn more about an area where dinosaur footprints were discovered 10 years ago. And in a single week, they’ve turned up at least two dozen footprints left by at least five different ancient species

Halfway into the second day along the Yukon River, the team is more than 300 miles west of Fairbanks, near Nulato. Paleontologist Tony Fiorillo points to two small blobs protruding out of a large block of yellow sandstone. They look like flattened tennis balls, except there are three distinct toes. These are 100-million-year-old dinosaur footprints.

“So it’s either another body size of a dinosaur that lived here or it’s a baby,” Fiorillo said.

Fiorillo is the Executive Director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. He said that this print was made by an ornithopod, a group of bipedal herbivores. This is the smallest ornithopod print he that said he’s ever found.

The leader of a three man team, Fiorillo also discovered signs of an ancient fish species. He pointed to a gray block of sandstone with marks that look like someone scraped their fingernails across it. There are a series of three evenly spaced, raised lines.

“What this surface is is an ichnogenus called undichna, a trace fossil of a fish, a bony fish,” Fiorillo said. “As the fish is swimming and it’s fins are hitting the bottom, the rays of the fin will do that.”

Between 2000 and 2013, Fiorillo, who is an expert on the dinosaurs that once roamed Alaska, visited the upper reaches of the Yukon River six times. During those years he only ever found two dinosaur footprints.

“That’s the hardest I ever worked for two footprints,” Fiorillo said.

But now, on the middle section of the river, Fiorillo said that it’s something of a “dinosaur bonanza.”

“I think it might have taken an hour to find the first footprint. I wouldn’t say the floodgates are open yet, but I think we’re gonna feel like that at the rate we’re finding stuff,” Fiorillo said.

By the end of the second day of field work, the three-man team had recorded nearly a dozen fossil footprints. In the following few days, that number has more than doubled and the team plans to continue their search through the middle of August.

A team of scientists was in Fairbanks this week making final preparations for a three-week expedition. The goal of the trip is to locate and document a treasure trove of dinosaur tracks discovered along the banks of the Yukon River a decade ago.

“When I started this project 24 years ago, I think the number of dinosaur sites known from Alaska you could count on one hand, maybe with a couple of extra fingers,” said New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Executive Director Tony Fiorillo. He’s an expert on dinosaurs in Alaska’s arctic and subarctic.

After dozens of field seasons along the Aleutian chain and on the North Slope, Fiorillo will explore new territory along the middle section of the Yukon River.

“We’ve got a geologic map. We know where the rocks of interest intersect with the river, and that’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to let the geology and paleontology determine what happens while we’re on the river,” Fiorillo said.

Back in 2013, a team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks reported finding thousands of tracks from at least two dinosaur species somewhere along the Yukon River between the villages of Ruby and Kaltag. It’s unclear if anyone has been back since, and it’s also unclear what the people who live along the river know about them, which is a question Fiorillo also wants to answer.

“These communities may actually have something just because they’re up and down that river. And those people see stuff, and they’ve had to have seen stuff, and maybe they have an explanation. What does that mean to them?” Fiorillo said. “And so if these communities have those stories, and if they’re willing to share them, I would love to hear them.”