Environment: Test on Taconite

By the shore of Gitche Gumee By the shining Big-Sea-Water

—The Song of Hiawatha Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

More than a century after it inspired Longfellow, the northernmost of the Great Lakes still lives up to the poet's praise. The world's largest expanse of fresh water, Lake Superior has managed to maintain much of its purity because it has attracted relatively few polluting industries. An exception: the Reserve Mining Co.'s ore-processing plant at Silver Bay, Minn., dumps 67,000 tons of pulverized taconite waste, or "tailings," into the lake every day.

Now the Justice Department has filed suit in federal court, demanding that the $350 million Silver Bay plant stop violating the Federal Water Quality Act of 1965. The action, brought at the request of the Environmental Protection Agency's William Ruckelshaus, is considered a major test of the Nixon Administration's willingness to combat wealthy and influential polluters. Says Ruckelshaus: "Lake Superior is a priceless natural resource, and we are committed to save it."

There once was a time, about 20 years ago, when Reserve Mining's plant was considered a blessing. Northern Minnesota, its Mesabi Range depleted of rich iron ore by a half-century of open-pit mining, teetered on the brink of economic collapse. Then engineers devised a method of extracting iron from crushed taconite, a flintlike rock that contains some 25% iron. Reserve Mining, which is owned by Armco and Republic Steel, easily obtained dumping permits on the assumption that the gray torrent of taconite would sink 900 feet to the bottom of the lake's "Great Trough."

Turning Green. By the mid-1960s, it had become clear that not all of the waste material was sinking as planned. Local residents complained that the crystalline waters were turning a vivid green. Algae flourished. Fishermen reported a considerable drop in catches on windy days when the taconite clouded the water.

After Minnesota set out to enforce its own water-pollution standards in the late 1960s, Reserve resisted in court and won, on the grounds that the state had not proved that the Silver Bay plant was polluting the lake. (That ruling is still being appealed.) A series of conferences among federal and state water-quality agencies finally concluded in 1970 that the taconite tailings were killing the organisms on which the lake's fish feed. But it was not until last year that Ruckelshaus formally demanded that Reserve present a plan to stop polluting the lake within six months. According to an EPA-sponsored study, one solution would be to dump the taconite inland, but Reserve said no. The mining company offered instead to pipe the taconite directly to the lake bottom, where it would supposedly form a harmless reef. That was not the answer, said Ruckelshaus.