Editor's note: This story's reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Leslie Sonne lives on a ranch in Northern Nevada’s Smith Valley, with four dogs, 30 chickens, two alpacas, three horses, and a stray cat named Ella. When I visit the ranch on a balmy June day, she’s trying to coax that cat inside a shed.
“Come on, Ella. Come on, kitty. Come on, momma,” she says, but Ella stays put. “All right, if you’re going to be that way, you don’t get to go back in where it’s nice and cool.”
Sonne’s husband, who collects antiques as a hobby, converted the shed into an old-timey general store when they moved here from Monterey, California, in late 2019. Sonne had retired from the Monterey Police Department, and the couple wanted to spend their days off-roading, stargazing, and enjoying the much-needed quiet and space in this rural corner of Nevada.
“We bought our lovely dream property abutting public lands here in Smith Valley in order to just enjoy the outdoors and the property and rescue dogs and rescue horses and rescue alpacas, and lots of chickens,” Sonne says.
And she was enjoying the outdoors, until she learned about a potential copper mining project in the valley she now calls home.
Sonne’s neighbor, Judy Harker, found out about the project from a friend. She learned that Hudbay Minerals, the company behind the project, wants to mine more than two billion tons of copper from an open pit on the east side of the valley. The pit would be more than a mile across and wide, and 2,100 feet deep.
Harker, who has lived in Smith Valley for more than 20 years, was worried about its potential impact to groundwater and the local ecosystem. So she, Sonne, and others in the valley banded together to create the group Citizens to Protect Smith Valley. They’re not against the mine, but they want to make their concerns known as the permitting process gets underway.
“It was really more about looking at water, looking at the environment, and trying to maintain the quality of life that we have in the valley, and really protecting the agriculture and the rural way of life, and protecting our open space as well,” Harker says.
Copper is a hot commodity in the western United States. It’s used in many different materials that power our daily lives, like electrical wiring and pipes. And it’s used in solar panels and electric car batteries, which are important to transitioning society off fossil fuels to combat climate change.
President Donald Trump’s administration is not exactly jumping at green energy development, but it does want the United States to produce more copper. In July, Trump announced a 50 percent tariff on copper imports. The aim is to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign nations for this material — especially China.
Amanda Hilton, president of the Nevada Mining Association, agrees, saying, “I am growing exceedingly concerned when looking at how much mineral production is happening overseas that the United States is dependent on, and now that we are seeing impacts from China shutting down the export of certain minerals, our country is starting to feel the pain.”
In Nevada, two active copper mines produce seven percent of America’s copper. Those numbers will likely go up. The Trump administration has already fast-tracked one Nevada copper mine, the Golden Mile project, in Mineral County. And there are proposed projects across the state — especially in the Smith Valley area, where there are plenty of copper deposits.
“That whole area there is definitely up for possible development,” says John Hadder, executive director for the nonprofit Great Basin Resource Watch. “(It) has the possibility of becoming a copper mining district, which would really change the whole nature of the area significantly.”
But while Nevada might have a lot of minerals, it lacks one key ingredient essential to mining: water. And that’s what worries environmentalists, academics — and residents.
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AFTER CHATTING FOR a few minutes, Sonne, Harker, and I pile into Sonne’s RAV4 to drive across Smith Valley and see where mining would take place.
“You can see lots of nice little hills and knolls and green, lots of green,” Sonne says, pointing to the landscape outside the window. “Wildflowers are pretty much gone, but variations of green with the sagebrush, the rabbit brush. But my assumption is, most of this will just be wiped clear. It’ll all be graded out for parts of their project.”
We see a bird dart past, but it’s too quick for any of us to identify.
“We’ve got red-tailed hawks. Lots of them,” Harker says. “Rough-legged hawks. Ferruginous hawks. All kinds of owls. We’ve got little kestrels. Long-eared owls. Great-horned owls.”
“Lots of wildflowers,” Sonne says.
It is, in other words, a desert valley full of life. And crucial to all that life is water.
“We are definitely overallocated, overpumped,” Harker says. “Anything having to do with water should be of concern to anyone in our basin. You can mitigate a lot of things with projects, but you can’t make water.”
As the nation’s driest state, Nevada doesn’t have a lot of water. But there’s more than you’d think. And most of it is underground.
“When you look into the heart of a desert spring, and you see that water coming out of the ground, it’s like looking into another universe,” says Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable water use throughout the region.
“What makes the Great Basin special is why the mining interests are here, and that is the relationship between our geology and our hydrogeology,” he says. “It’s what pushes the water out of the ground to give us springs that our wildlife depend on.”
My assumption is, most of this will just be wiped clear. It’ll all be graded out for parts of their project.Leslie Sonne, co-founder of Citizens to Protect Smith Valley
Over millions of years, minerals washed down from mountains and built up in the closed basins typical of Nevada. Today, they have no outlet to the sea, so the minerals just stay there — making the region attractive to mining companies.
Water also built up over time — but under the surface.
“Groundwater becomes really important in a state like Nevada, where we don’t have very many perennial streams and rivers,” says Kate Berry, a UNR geographer who studies water, mining, and environmental justice. “The thing about groundwater is that it’s inconspicuous. You don’t see it.”
Many people rely on groundwater in Nevada. Ranchers, farmers, tribes. In Las Vegas, we get most of our water from the Colorado River, and about 10 percent of it from underground. By contrast, the 2,000 or so residents of Tonopah are entirely dependent on groundwater.
Groundwater becomes a problem for mining companies, Berry says, because in order to extract minerals, many dig deep pits that intersect with this water. The mining companies don’t want the water — they want the rock. So, they do what’s called “dewatering,” pumping the water out and moving it somewhere else. Then they can continue their excavation, extracting ore and moving it as well.
A typical copper project can use billions of gallons of water a year. Hudbay estimates its Mason project in the Smith Valley will use between 7,000 and 16,000 acre-feet (325,851 gallons) of water a year. For context, a typical household in Las Vegas uses a little less than half an acre-foot of water a year.
Another issue is not just water quantity, but quality. Rock material reacts with oxygen, starting a process that generates acid, which can drain out.
Copper mining — and the issues it poses — isn’t going away. Copper is a highly conductive metal; that’s why we use it in wiring. Because of its many uses, the U.S. Department of Energy has designated copper a critical mineral, meaning it’s important for energy technologies. Important for our national security, and our economy.
Still, Berry asks, “Who is it critical for? And then who’s impacted by it?”
AT HIS HOME in Sparks, Cory Rockwell, an underground miner, shows me his old hard hats.
“Every mine I go to, I start off with a new hard hat. These are from a few mines that I’ve worked at,” he says. He lists each: one from Nevada Copper, in Yerington; another from Greens Creek, with a company called Hecla in Juneau, Alaska; another from the Turquoise Ridge mine, with Nevada Gold Mines.
Rockwell got his start in Nevada working at what’s now the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Northern Nevada. And he worked a stint at Pumpkin Hollow, a copper project near Yerington that went bankrupt last year but may see a second life soon. These days, he’s working at a gold mine in Alaska. He works underground, in explosives, essentially blasting rock into smaller bits so it can be moved for further processing.
Rockwell loves his job — so much that he has 170,000 followers on TikTok. In one popular clip, he shows a bolter, used to stabilize mine shafts. The job bought him a house in Sparks. It lets him raise his 10-year-old son as a single dad.
“A lot of people, when they think about mining, they just think about the worst stuff,” he says. “You know, mining companies poisoning the water.” But for him, the U.S. does it better than other countries. We have environmental reviews and worker safety measures. For now.
“These minerals — we’re going to get them one way or the other. Our species needs it. Our survival depends on it,” he says. “It is kind of a tradeoff.”
Environmentalists acknowledge this tension. “I fully understand that I use phones, and I drive cars, and I use computers, and I create the demand, too,” says the Great Basin Water Network’s Roerink. “This is our challenge as it relates to copper, as it relates to lithium and even gold.”
I requested an interview with Hudbay Minerals but didn’t get a response. I wanted to visit an active copper mine and had planned to visit the state’s largest, the Robinson Mine near Ely. But after we agreed on a tour, John Haynes, a spokesperson for the mine’s Polish parent company, KGHM, wrote to me in an email, “We will not host you at site nor provide an interview as requested.”
The Nevada Mining Association’s Hilton affirms Rockwell’s assessment that demand for copper isn’t likely to slow. “Copper has been produced for thousands and thousands of years,” she says. “It’s been mined in the state of Nevada for over 150 years. The green energy transition is just another layer of where the copper demand is coming from.”
She called Nevada’s mine reclamation regulations “world class” and says the state’s mining industry aims to be sustainable. “All of our mine sites across the state of Nevada are working on minimizing their water usage, recycling their water usage, and making sure that they are optimizing every gallon of water,” she says.
SO, WHAT ARE we supposed to do? The year 2024 was the hottest on record. The year before that was the hottest on record. We need copper for solar panels, for electric vehicles, to stop our planet from getting even hotter — or at least, to slow the heat.
But copper extraction has its own cost, and a mine’s legacy long outlives its actual life. “That’s a problem with a lot of copper mines,” says Glenn Miller, emeritus professor of environmental science at UNR. “When people walk away from them, when they aren’t profitable. That’s when the real problems start.”
He emphasizes that acid can drain from large heaps of extracted copper when it rains. Another issue, he says, is general disturbance of the land.
“A lot of the copper mines that are deep have open pit mines that fill with water, and that water can be horrendously bad,” Miller says.
I want to see what “horrendously bad” water looks like, so I end my drive with Sonne and Harker, from the Citizens to Protect Smith Valley, at the Anaconda copper mine near Yerington. Anaconda stopped mining copper in 1978. In 2000, the company abandoned the site without properly closing it. The Environmental Protection Agency designated it a Superfund site, meaning it’s a priority for cleanup.
We see signs posted along a barbed wire fence that read, “Danger, unsafe mine.”
“It’s like a different planet,” Sonne says.
“It just looks like a barren landscape,” Harker adds. “Nothing will grow on it. You might as well be on the moon.”
We arrive at the pit, where, decades ago, miners dug for copper. There, water from the aquifer, that deep groundwater that mining companies remove so they can get the rock, has naturally risen back. The water is dark, with light edges — pollen, Sonne speculates. Birds swoop — swallows, Harker says.
If you didn’t know what you were looking at, I tell them, you might just think it’s a peaceful lake.
Sonne considers this. “I’ve been over here at times when it’s almost more teal in color depending on the sky and the clouds,” she says. “But what are you going to do with it?”
That beautiful blue water is contaminated — with arsenic, zinc, mercury, lead, manganese, and who knows how many other byproducts from all those decades ago.
In 2018, the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection started working with Atlantic Richfield Company, the mine’s former owner, who’s responsible for cleaning up the site. The EPA is still involved, because of the potential impact on the Yerington Paiutes’ tribal lands. NDEP, as it’s called, presented a cleanup plan in 2020, but it’s been a slow process. The mine is expected to close in 2029, but the Bureau of Land Management is considering selling the public land in and around the former mine site back to the company.
The move worries environmentalists, who believe such a sale would end oversight of the mine cleanup.
And so, Sonne’s question remains: What, in the end, can we do with it?
