A national quest for uranium comes to remote Western Alaska, raising fears in a nearby village

Demand for low-carbon nuclear energy could boost uranium prospects on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. But residents of the small village of Elim fear a mine would pollute the river they depend on.

This story was published in partnership with Inside Climate News and is the second in a two-story series.

ELIM, ALASKA — Daylight was waning as Beverly Nakarak opened the throttle of her snowmachine and sped across a flat, white expanse dotted with stunted spruce trees.

Her destination: the mouth of the Tubutulik River, a favorite ice-fishing spot about 15 miles from the small village of Elim, on the southern shore of the remote Seward Peninsula.

It was just after 7 p.m. on a Friday in early March, and Nakarak, 32, had had a busy day. After a shift at her job as a health aide at the village clinic, she had attended a funeral and community potluck.

Still, as darkness descended, Nakarak went looking for tubuq, or whitefish, a staple food for many of Elim’s roughly 350 residents, including her three children.

“Gotta work, but gotta go get fish, too,” Nakarak said.

Tubutulik means “place with lots of white fish” in the local Iñupiaq language. The river and the surrounding tundra and forest are also prime spots for berry picking, moose hunting and salmon fishing. Wild runs of pink, coho, chum and king salmon still pulse up the Tubutulik every summer, and many families in Elim tend seasonal camps near the river’s mouth, where they hang, dry and smoke fish.

The area’s wealth of wild foods, and its cultural importance to the region’s Iñupiaq and Yup’ik people, explains why locals like Nakarak are so worried about a new mining development near the Tubutulik’s headwaters.

In the past two years, two companies searching for minerals snatched up hundreds of state and federal mining claims in the Darby Mountains about 30 miles north of the village.

One, a small, publicly-traded Canadian outfit called Panther Minerals, plans to drill dozens of exploratory holes over the next four years to search for uranium. The other, Alaska Critical Minerals LLC, is a private company with hardly a trace online, other than a shared address with a high-powered law firm’s Anchorage office. It has not publicly disclosed plans for its claims near Elim.

Prospectors have long suspected the Seward Peninsula—the finger of Alaska that touches the Bering Strait—could hold vast stores of uranium essential to nuclear energy and weapons. It also could host deposits of rare earth elements, a group of metals critical to modern technology.

Several decades from now, Elim could become “the uranium capital of America,” Dave Hedderly-Smith told regional radio station KNOM last year. Hedderly-Smith, who lives in Washington, is a prospector who originally staked some of the Seward Peninsula’s mining claims more than 40 years ago and is now leasing them to Panther, which hired him as an advisor.

The company, citing uranium’s use in nuclear reactors, bills itself as moving the U.S. toward low-carbon electricity and energy independence.

As miners look to cash in on rising demand for that metal, along with other elements used in energy technologies like electric car batteries and solar panels, a new era of mining has opened across the country.

The rush could transform the wild landscape and rural economy of the Seward Peninsula, which remains one of the most remote parts of Alaska.

Roughly 100 miles west of Panther’s claims, another company, Vancouver-based Graphite One, hopes to dig a huge graphite mine.

Spurred by a $37.5 million grant from the U.S. government, the graphite development is much further along. Unlike the uranium prospect, it has the backing of several Alaska elected officials and a major Indigenous-owned corporation in the region.

Panther’s project is still a very long way from becoming a producing mine. The company hasn’t started drilling core samples yet, and it typically takes several years, if not decades, of drilling and other work to determine whether a deposit is big and accessible enough to be mined profitably.

Still, Elim’s leaders say the village opposes any mining activities near the river its residents have long relied on for food and cultural practices. A consortium of the region’s 20 tribal governments also opposes the project.

“If they were to contaminate any of the water, I don’t know if the marine life would survive,” said Paul Nagaruk, Elim’s mayor. “We couldn’t have our food,” if the Tubutulik gets polluted.

A mine would be worrisome “even if we were rich” from it, he added.

Typical of many Alaska villages, just a single, small grocery store with a thin selection of fresh produce and painfully high prices serves Elim’s population. In March, a box of Cheerios was selling for nearly $14, double the price in Anchorage.

Many Elim residents shop at the store only for staples like rice. The bulk of their food comes from fishing, hunting or harvesting, particularly along the Tubutulik River.

During the last full survey of the community’s subsistence practices, in 2006, every household in the village reported consuming wild foods, and 96 percent reported consuming salmon.

On her snowmachine in March, Nakarak deftly steered through snow-covered willows, then dropped onto the frozen Tubutulik and zipped north. A few minutes later, she stopped by a slender piece of wood jutting up from the snow, likely placed there by her brother to mark a fishing hole in the ice.

Northern Journal contributor Max Graham can be reached at [email protected]. He’s interested in any and all mining related stories, as well as introductory meetings with people in and around the industry.