Dan Hernesmaa’s letter in the June 13 edition of the Timberjay was long on Twin Metals talking points but short on facts, science, and law.
Antofagasta’s Twin Metals did not lose lawful active mining permits. Twin Metals seeks to mine public lands and minerals in the Rainy River headwaters upstream of the Boundary Waters. When Antofagasta acquired Duluth Metals, and thus Twin Metals, in January 2015, Twin Metals had no permits but only pending applications for renewal of two expired federal mineral leases.
Forest Service consent is required by law for mining in Minnesota’s national forests. In deciding whether to consent to lease renewal, the Forest Service examined the environmental impact if copper mining were to occur upstream of the Boundary Waters.
After determining that copper mining in the Rainy River headwaters posed an extreme risk of harm to the Boundary Waters, and that if damage occurred it could not be fixed, the Forest Service withheld its consent and the renewal applications were denied in 2016.
The Trump administration ignored this and other federal mining laws and regulations and illegally renewed the Twin Metals mineral leases in 2019. These unlawful leases were properly canceled in 2022, in part because the Forest Service did not consent to the 2019 renewal. The Forest Service reaffirmed its position that the Rainy River headwaters is the wrong place for sulfide-ore copper mining as recently as December 2024.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency agrees; it determined in its 2017 Watershed Monitoring and Assessment Report that “the majority of the waterbodies within [the Rainy River headwaters] had exceptional biological, chemical, and physical characteristics that are worthy of additional protection.”
Eighty percent of the Boundary Waters is in the downstream half of the Rainy River headwaters. Surface water in the portion of the Rainy River headwaters outside the wilderness flows north into the Boundary Waters. The four separate deposits that Antofagasta has proposed to mine along the South Kawishiwi River and Birch Lake, plus the Teck Mesaba deposit south of Babbitt, all lie in the Rainy River headwaters. All the pollution from those mines would make its way downstream to Basswood.
A March 2025 study of eight modern hardrock mines that received permits after 1990 confirmed the findings of an earlier 2006 study. Both studies showed that hardrock mines operating in close proximity to surface and groundwater consistently pollute, despite mitigation measures and despite environmental review predictions that they would not do so. The March 2025 study found that all eight modern mines polluted surface waters and seven of the eight mines polluted groundwater (no groundwater data was available for the eighth mine).
Sulfides, sulfate, and lots of heavy metals and residual processing chemicals would go into the tailings pile. In 2019, Twin Metals submitted a mine plan to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources that included a 430-acre tailings storage facility on a 640-acre parcel of state land near the shore of Birch Lake. The DNR denied permission to Twin Metals to use this state land for its tailings pile because of the “unacceptable financial risk to the state.”
The risk is that the state and the school trust fund could be held liable for Superfund damages and the environmental clean-up costs as a result of the inevitable pollution from tailings.
Hernesmaa says he wants science and the state and federal governments to make decisions on copper mining in the Rainy River headwaters. The federal government made the decision that sulfide-ore copper mining should not be allowed in the Rainy River headwaters in 2023 after a comprehensive science-based environmental assessment of the risks. Contrary to a strange sentence in Hernesmaa’s letter, the environmental assessment relied on reams of data, including submittals by the mining industry. Twenty-one detailed reports underlie the environmental assessment. As a result of that comprehensive science-based analysis, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management recommended a 20-year mining ban on all federal lands and minerals in the Rainy River headwaters. Their recommendations were accepted by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who issued a Public Land Order with a 20-year mining ban in January 2023.
Becky Rom
Ely