Flash smelting in Halkidiki would require the “feed” to come from both the Olympia and Skouries mines; 90 percent of the feed is expected to come from the Olympia fields, which have between 9 and 12 percent concentration of arsenic. According to several experts I interviewed, as there is no known technique for thoroughly cleaning air, most of the gas emitted from the processing would be arsenic-laden.

There are other issues with Eldorado’s proposed use of flash smelting. As stipulated in the contract, the company was to build a flash smelting facility to test the procedure using soil and minerals from the Skouries region. But this hasn’t been done, according to Christos Adamidis, a member of the collective S.O.S. Halkidiki, established in 2010 in the nearby town of Ierissos to counter the gold mine. Instead, Adamidis told me, the company designed a test in northern Europe using South American soil. The Greek head of Hellas Gold has confirmed as much: In a somewhat awkward on-camera interview in a televised documentary that aired in November 2017 on the Greek channel ERT, he said the use of flash smelting was not guaranteed because the procedure hadn’t actually been tested in the region with local soil, only once in Finland.