Northern Dynasty Comments At Public Hearings On The EPA's Draft Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Report

VANCOUVER, May 31, 2012 /PRNewswire/ - Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. ("Northern Dynasty" or the "Company") (TSX: NDM; NYSE Amex: NAK) made a presentation today at the public hearings in Seattle, Washington regarding the draft Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment report released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on May 18, 2012.

The complete text of the presentation by Sean Magee, Northern Dynasty's Vice President, Public Affairs, is provided below:

Good afternoon.

My name is Sean Magee, and I'm here today on behalf of Northern Dynasty Minerals - a 50% owner of the Pebble Project.

I am also here to represent our shareholders, some three-quarters of whom are residents of the United States.

I'd like to begin by saying that when we first learned the EPA had initiated the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment, we welcomed it.

We welcomed it because, in launching the assessment, the EPA had rejected the idea of pre-emptively vetoing the Pebble Project because there existed insufficient information to do so. We agreed with that conclusion then and we agree with it today.

However, we also felt the Watershed Assessment presented a unique opportunity to inject some science into what has become an extremely volatile, politicized and emotional debate.

We felt that if the EPA could apply its experience and good objective science, then the Watershed Assessment would surely present a more realistic view of the potential effects of mine development in southwest Alaska. We believed it would more realistically frame the issues of risk and reward, and correct the popular myth that a modern mine occupying less than one-twentieth of 1% of the land base, within a 400 square mile area that produces just one half of 1% of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon, could somehow wipe out an entire fishery.

That would have been a positive contribution to the public discussion around Pebble. It would have eliminated the extremes of rhetoric that have characterized this debate for years, and helped prepare stakeholders for the federal and state permitting process to come.

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