James Bell, 50, sits carv­ing the intri­cate details of an arm into a totem pole in his shop in this sleepy, coastal south­east­ern Alas­ka town. He wears glass­es with a snap-on set of bifo­cals to bet­ter guide his carv­ing knife, and the occa­sion­al hearty chuck­le reveals deep wrin­kles around his eyes. A life­long fish­er­man and long­shore­man, Bell’s hands are worn from years of haul­ing nets laden with salmon and load­ing old growth trees onto barges bound for the pulp mill in near­by Ketchikan.

Despite the promise of jobs, some residents say a mine will lead to pollution of their salmon fisheries—amounting to a sacrifice of the town’s economic and cultural lifeblood for a mining prospect that, environmentally and economically, raises more questions than it answers.

Bell was born in Hyd­aburg and is a mem­ber of the Hai­da Tribe that is indige­nous to this region. He speaks of his small, iso­lat­ed town — Hydaburg’s pop­u­la­tion hov­ers at around 380 — with an air of res­ig­na­tion and sad­ness. There are few jobs to be had these days, he says. The log­ging boom is over and the price of salmon is lack­lus­ter at best. More and more, laments Bell, Hydaburg’s young peo­ple are choos­ing to leave town in search of oppor­tu­ni­ties in big­ger cities, like Ketchikan, about a half-day’s jour­ney by ferry.

Dur­ing the com­mer­cial fish­ing sea­son, unem­ploy­ment in Hyd­aburg hov­ers at around 12 per­cent, but shoots up to about 19 per­cent in the win­ter off­sea­son. In pre­vi­ous decades, the Ton­gass Nation­al For­est was a boon for log­ging com­pa­nies and a source of local jobs in Hyd­aburg, until recent leg­is­la­tion put a stop to mass logging.

Thir­ty-five miles away, at the foot of Bokan Moun­tain on the shore of Kendrick Bay, how­ev­er, lies one of the most sought-after nat­ur­al resources in the world — one that could con­ceiv­ably reverse the town’s eco­nom­ic fortunes.

Dys­pro­sium, a ​“rare-earth” ele­ment, is essen­tial in the pro­duc­tion of tech­nolo­gies as var­ied as iPhones, wind tur­bines, smart bombs and preda­tor drones. Chi­na cur­rent­ly dom­i­nates the glob­al dys­pro­sium mar­ket, but the dis­cov­ery near Hyd­aburg could change all of that by sup­ply­ing U.S. pro­duc­tion demands for decades to come.

Not every­one in Hyd­aburg, how­ev­er, is enthu­si­as­tic about the idea of a mine. Despite the promise of jobs, some res­i­dents say a mine will lead to pol­lu­tion of their salmon fish­eries — amount­ing to a sac­ri­fice of the town’s eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al lifeblood for a min­ing prospect that, envi­ron­men­tal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly, rais­es more ques­tions than it answers.

​“If they (the min­ing com­pa­nies) go by the laws, it will be all right,” says Bell. ​“If they don’t, then they’ll just kill off our fish.”

Bell has good rea­son to be skep­ti­cal. Bokan Moun­tain has been mined before, and the com­mu­ni­ties sur­round­ing it are still deal­ing with the fall­out. The U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA) declared a retired ura­ni­um mine at Bokan Moun­tain a Super­fund site (a pol­lut­ed area requir­ing a long-term response to clean up its tox­ic waste) in 2000. Now, res­i­dents wor­ry that so-called ​“acidic tail­ing” — the liq­uid, often tox­ic, byprod­ucts of min­ing — from the pro­posed rare earth mine could fur­ther con­t­a­m­i­nate Kendrick Bay waters, sul­ly­ing one of the community’s pri­ma­ry sub­sis­tence fish­ing areas and dam­ag­ing the region­al com­mer­cial fish­ing industry.

When it comes to con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the land, for­mer May­or Thomas Mor­ri­son says, ​“There are peo­ple [in Hyd­aburg] that real­ly care.” But since the land in ques­tion is owned by the Nation­al For­est Ser­vice and has been des­ig­nat­ed a min­er­al explo­ration area, he says, ​“their voice is like spit­ting in the wind.”

High demand

Because the Depart­ment of Defense needs dys­pro­sium for weapons pro­duc­tion, it has recent­ly shown inter­est in Bokan Moun­tain — dys­pro­sium was dis­cov­ered there in ear­ly 2010 — as a domes­tic source of the min­er­al. Dys­pro­sium is also high­ly sought-after by the Depart­ment of Ener­gy (DOE) for its appli­ca­tions in renew­able ener­gy technology.

Dr. David Shuh, a senior sci­en­tist in the Chem­i­cal Sci­ences Divi­sion at the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab (LBNL), explained why dys­pro­sium is cur­rent­ly essen­tial in hybrid cars like the Prius:

With­out dys­pro­sium, actu­al­ly, the motor over­heats rather eas­i­ly and dys­pro­sium is used to keep that heat­ing down and keep the mag­net togeth­er so it doesn’t lit­er­al­ly explode at oper­a­tional tem­per­a­ture… So it turns out it’s tremen­dous­ly important.

One Prius requires approx­i­mate­ly 3.5 ounces of dys­pro­sium. Toy­ota plans to sell one mil­lion of the hybrid cars per year over the next decade. That’s near­ly 10 tons of dys­pro­sium per year used by Toy­ota on the Prius line alone — or rough­ly 1 per­cent of China’s annu­al export of 992 tons.

In 2010, part­ly to demon­strate their dom­i­nance in the glob­al mar­ket for rare earth ele­ments, Chi­na began stock­pil­ing their dys­pro­sium, rais­ing tar­iffs and reduc­ing exports — moves which left the U.S. defense and ener­gy sec­tors in a bind. As a result, the U.S. gov­ern­ment is des­per­ate to tap a domes­tic sup­ply of dysprosium.

In Decem­ber 2011, the DOE pub­lished a report say­ing dys­pro­sium is of strate­gic nation­al impor­tance and nation­al security.

Since the dis­cov­ery of dys­pro­sium here, polit­i­cal sup­port for the mine has been increas­ing. In March 2012, then pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney ref­er­enced the issue in an open let­ter to the state of Alas­ka: ​“Rare earth min­er­als found in Alas­ka can help free our coun­try from monop­o­lies abroad.”

But envi­ron­men­tal­ists and locals like Bell wor­ry that the government’s thirst for the ele­ment will result in a lack of adher­ence to EPA reg­u­la­tions for min­ing. And their con­cerns appear to have mer­it: The min­ing project is eli­gi­ble to apply for a stream­lin­ing of the envi­ron­men­tal review process due to its nation­al secu­ri­ty importance.

Because one of the rare earths to be mined, dys­pro­bi­um, is ​“con­sid­ered of strate­gic nation­al impor­tance, nor­mal envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions may be dis­re­gard­ed,” accord­ing to a report by the South­east­ern Alas­ka Con­ser­va­tion Coun­cil (SEACC).

The EPA declined to give an inter­view for this arti­cle after sev­er­al attempts, on the grounds that they have not yet been approached by the min­ing com­pa­ny Ucore Rare Met­als for air and water per­mits and do not want to speak in hypotheticals.

A pre­lim­i­nary 2010 min­er­al study indi­cat­ed that the Bokan Moun­tain site holds 5.3 mil­lion tons of heavy rare earths, with 207,000 tons of that being dys­pro­sium — effec­tive­ly mak­ing it the largest known dys­pro­sium deposit in the Unit­ed States. Jim McKen­zie, CEO of Ucore, says they plan to be in pro­duc­tion by late 2015 or ear­ly 2016.

How clean?

Ken Col­li­son, a min­ing engi­neer and the Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer of Ucore, the com­pa­ny that plans to break ground on the rare earth mine at Bokan Moun­tain, has the job of explain­ing why it will not harm the environment.

The mine will be under­ground, says Col­li­son, with Ucore plan­ning to re-inject the acidic tail­ings, or tox­ic byprod­ucts, back into the moun­tain with cement. ​“We’ll be the first mine I’ve ever heard about [that] when it clos­es, there’ll be no tail­ings what­so­ev­er,” he says.

Ucore also plans to uti­lize a new tech­nique for sort­ing min­er­als that uses laser tech­nol­o­gy to detect and sort spe­cif­ic ores, which in the­o­ry should make the mine more effi­cient than those that pre­ced­ed it. The tech­nol­o­gy in ques­tion has nev­er been applied to rare earth min­ing before.

That doesn’t stop CEO Jim McKen­zie from declar­ing that the tech­nol­o­gy will enable the com­pa­ny ​“to cut the bulk of the mate­r­i­al that comes out of the mine vir­tu­al­ly in half the rate of oth­er mines.”

In April 2010, not long after dys­pro­sium was dis­cov­ered at Bokan Moun­tain, the Alas­ka State Leg­is­la­ture draft­ed a res­o­lu­tion urg­ing U.S. Con­gress to issue per­mits ​“as prompt­ly as allowed by law, for extrac­tion, pro­cess­ing, and pro­duc­tion of rare earth mate­ri­als on the Bokan Moun­tain properties.”

The CEO acknowl­edged that Ucore plans to go into pro­duc­tion by the end of 2015, about five years soon­er than it would take most min­ing projects to get off the ground. ​“In actu­al­i­ty that’s light­ning speed,” McKen­zie says.

​“The Bokan mine has a lot going for it,” he adds, because Alas­ka is one of the ​“most mine friend­ly juris­dic­tions in the world.”

Signs from the past

Ucore recent­ly pub­lished a Pre­lim­i­nary Eco­nom­ic Fea­si­bil­i­ty study, a first step toward break­ing ground, and the com­pa­ny remains on course to open the mine in 2015. They con­tin­ue to move ahead on an aggres­sive agen­da that will make the dig at Bokan Moun­tain the first heavy rare earth mine in the Unit­ed States to open in the next few years.

Mean­while, a grow­ing clam­or for domes­tic rare earth min­ing can be heard ema­nat­ing from the halls of the Pen­ta­gon to the board­rooms of tech­nol­o­gy and clean ener­gy companies.

Whether Alaska’s Hai­da com­mu­ni­ty will ben­e­fit from the Bokan mine, how­ev­er, remains to be seen.

Asked if he has a mes­sage for Ucore’s CEO, Hai­da trib­al mem­ber James Bell looks up from the totem and sums up what many in his com­mu­ni­ty are hop­ing: ​“Keep it clean, and don’t kill off our subsistence.”

Along a path­way on the side of Bokan Moun­tain, a sign post­ed by the U.S. For­est Ser­vice at the mouth of an old ura­ni­um mine offers a reminder of what may again lie ahead, should the cham­pi­ons of expe­di­en­cy win out over those who would plead for cau­tion. The sign fea­tures illus­tra­tions and words that cau­tion read­ers of the dan­gers sur­round­ing the aban­doned mine.

Includ­ed is a draw­ing of an indi­vid­ual who is grab­bing his throat, accom­pa­nied by a cap­tion: ​“Tox­ic gas­es and lack of oxygen.”

Anoth­er pan­el reads: ​“Deep pools of con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed water” next to an image of a splayed, out­stretched hand reach­ing out of sludge.

The lega­cy of min­ing in the area is summed up by the words at the bot­tom of the alu­minum sig, which are accom­pa­nied by skull and cross­bones: ​“Stay Out. Stay Alive.”

This arti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished by New Amer­i­can Media.

Research for this sto­ry was made pos­si­ble by a grant from the Fund for Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism.