Extraction

In many ways, Narsaq has become a symbol of the green future’s resource bottleneck, and a cautionary tale for building equitable and sustainable supply chains for digital technology and renewable energy.

Greenland Minerals weaves tales about safety, cleanliness, growth, and job creation, but it cannot hide the fact that, in addition to the open pit rare earth and uranium mine, this project will require a massive expansion of infrastructure that will fundamentally change the face of the region. This will include an independent diesel powerplant, an acid-flotation processing facitlity, a port at the site of Narsaq’s current landfill, and a large dam around a nearby lake to contain all the tailings waste (see map). And because of the mine’s close proximity to the town itself (only about 6 miles), this project has met continuous stiff opposition from residents, as well as from international environmental activists.

Narsaq is located near the northern end of a unique geologic formation called the Ilimaussaq Alkaline Intrusive Complex, estimated to be about 1.6 billion years old. Minerally distinct from its surrounding areas, the Ilimaussaq Complex is rather small, measuring only 8 X 17 kilometers, covering land on either side of the Tunulliarfik Fjord, with the city limits of Narsaq sitting just outside its official boundaries. Some of the most tightly compacted and complex mineral formations on Earth can be found in this area, and with that comes an elevated incidence of rare earths, as well as a litany of radioactive ore bodies. This exhibit explores the cultural, political, and geological life of Narsaq, and what this small town at the top of the world can tell us about the material futures of digital technology and green energy.

Rocks here have stories. One such story tells of a rare pink stone called tugtupite that is found nowhere in the world except the Kvanefjeld Plateau. According to the local Inuit, tugtupite, roughly translating to “reindeer blood,” formed when Tuttu, a pregnant reindeer woman, climbed the plateau and gave birth atop the peaks towering over Narsap Illua. The blood from this birth washed down the valley and soaked into the rocks, forming radiant pink crystals. Tugtupite is highly prized by locals, and has become a feature of the Greenlandic gem trade. Everyone who grew up in Narsaq knows the story of tugtupite. The rocks are part of the cultural fabric.

The story of tugtupite is deeply entangled with another one of Narsaq’s signature minerals—uranium. In 1957, upon the discovery of a massive uranium reserve by Henning Sørensen (who also claimed to have “discovered” tugtupite), Danish physicist Niels Bohr visited Narsaq to proclaim the town part of the world’s nuclear future. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Danish government hauled thousands of tons of uranium out of Kvanefjeld, shipping most of it to the Risø National Laboratory for testing. However, after anti-nuclear sentiments in Europe blocked Denmark’s plans for nuclear expansion, the operation was shuttered, and the Danish government abandoned large piles of radioactive waste rock at the base of Kvanefjeld, which continue to sit there to this day. Many locals walk daily through Narsap Ilua where, because of the presence of this waste rock, as well as the already heightened background radiation, they are exposed to about 350 millirems of radiation per hour (see photo). If averaged over the course of a year, this amount nearly reaches the occupational radiation exposure limit in the United States! Even without any mining at all, Narsaq is already beset by an invisible poison, one residents have long feared.

As with Tugtupite, uranium stories abound in Narsaq. A local farmer claims that mining in the 1970s turned the livers of his sheep black as oil and, when mining ceased, the livers returned to normal. Another resident told me that during the more recent drilling tests by Greenland Minerals she witnessed entire schools of fish wash up dead in the bay. I could not substantiate either of these claims, but it speaks to the existential anxiety that the threat of radiation has produced in this region. This anxiety, and the narratives surrounding it, have profoundly shifted the local public’s threshold for what kinds of waste are and are not acceptable.

So, while Greenland Minerals has produced mountains of data allegedly outlining the safety of this project, this data is only one narrative, and comes into constant conflict with other local narratives. Local activists have even taken it upon themselves to annotate sections of the project’s Environmental Impact Report (See Figure 3) with recalculated data, and filed this data with the government. (See the Urani, Naamik! section for more details)