Pollution fight Critical minerals turn Greenland into a legal battleground

From the iceberg-filled bay, the mountains above the town of Narsaq, in south-west Greenland, appear unremarkable.

- Patrick Greenfield Narsaq Phoebe Weston

Clumps of grass cling to the smooth, grey peaks shaped over centuries by an enormous ice cap that lurks behind the fjords on the horizon.

Brightly coloured homes are scattered around the shoreline below, home to a community of just over 1,300 people.

Were it not for a mining outhouse on the edge of town, there would be little indication of the potential riches in the rock.

The range is home to one of the largest undeveloped deposits of rare-earth minerals and uranium in the world: the Kvanefjeld site, or Kuannersuit in Greenlandic.

It contains high concentrations of metals used to manufacture permanent magnets in wind turbines and electric cars.

Every major power in the world is scrambling to get access to these minerals for carbon-free energy and transport.

A proposed open-pit mine would be worth about $7.5bn (£6bn) if it went ahead, according to the site operator. But when the mining company acquired the site in 2007, the impact of potentially radioactive waste contaminating drinking water and nearby sheep farms alarmed local people.

They feared that the "tailings" - a slurry of ground-up waste from mining - would be laced with radioactive waste and could contaminate waterways or spread as dust in the air.

In 2021, Greenland went to the polls in a contest to which uranium was so central that international media called it "the mining election".

The people voted in a green, leftwing government, led by the Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which campaigned against uranium mining because of the potential pollution.

When it took power, the new government kept its campaign promise, passing legislation to ban uranium mining. While not primarily a uranium mine, the Kvanefjeld project would require unearthing it to extract its rare earth oxides, putting it in violation of the law.

Many Greenlanders celebrated the vote as a victory for health and the environment.