http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/062309/loc_453703862.shtmlThe U.S. Supreme Court sided with Coeur Alaska and the state of Alaska on Monday, meaning tailings mine waste from the Kensington gold mine can be dumped into Lower Slate Lake. It's the first time in 30 years a U.S. mine will be allowed to transform a natural lake into a tailings pond. The court's ruling, one of the last of its term, resolves a lawsuit that the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Lynn Canal Conservation and the Juneau Group of the Sierra Club brought in 2006. Both sides say it sets a precedent - one hailed by the mine industry and builders but deplored by environmentalists. It greenlights the Kensington mine that has been in the works for two decades but on hold since mid-2007. It's expected to support 200 well-paid workers once operational.
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Coeur's plan was to dump 4.5 million tons of tailings into Lower Slate Lake. The plan would raise the lake's bottom 50 feet, increasing its footprint to 60 acres from 23, and kill all the fish in it. Coeur planned to treat all of the lake's runoff, which heads into Slate Creek and down to Berners Bay. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called the tailings fill, said Coeur's plan was the least environmentally damaging option and gave the company a permit. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it wasn't the best option but didn't object. Environmentalists sued. They said the EPA's own regulations prohibited any discharge into a water body, and that turning a lake into a tailings pond was contrary to the Clean Water Act of 1972. They lost in district court but won on appeal in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007.
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The question at hand: Should federal permitters consider tailings, the ground-up waste rock that's left after the ore is removed, to be fill in the lake or wastewater from the mine? If it's fill, the Corps is in charge. If it's wastewater, as SEACC unsuccessfully argued, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 1982 standards apply. They're specifically for froth-flotation mills like Coeur's, in which miners mix ground-up rock with a detergent to make the gold float so it can be skimmed off. The standard is zero discharge, which means tailings couldn't go into Slate Lake.
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion says both the Clean Water Act and the regulations from the agencies are ambiguous on what kind of permit Coeur should have. So the Court should defer, he wrote, to the agencies' interpretation of their own regulations. He specifically referred to a 2004 memo in which an EPA official said it was OK to apply the EPA standard to the water coming out of the lake, instead of the water going into it.
Dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, however, the Clean Water Act was unambiguous. She quoted its writers: "'The use of any river, lake, stream or ocean as a waste treatment system,' the Act's drafters stated, 'is unacceptable.'" Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens joined her in the minority. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts backed Kennedy. Anthonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer wrote their own concurring opinions. ..(more@link)
http://www.adn.com/money/industries/mining/story/840031.htmlThe U.S. Supreme Court's Monday decision allowing a gold mine near Juneau to discharge its waste into a fish-bearing lake could be the final word in the long-running dispute. But environmentalists hope that it is not. Their lawsuit over the Kensington mine, 45 miles northwest of Juneau, fueled a bitter war between industry boosters and environmentalists in the state's capital. Statewide, the suit cast a shadow over Alaska's mining industry, and in particular, the massive Pebble copper and gold prospect in Southwest Alaska.
On Monday, Kensington's supporters -- including the entire Alaska congressional delegation and Gov. Sarah Palin -- hailed the Supreme Court decision as a positive step for Juneau and the state. Coeur Alaska Inc., operator of the Kensington mine, announced plans to begin producing gold in the last half of 2010. But environmentalists say their fight is not over.
About 150 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are co-sponsoring legislation this year seeking to reverse the Bush administration policy that the Supreme Court relied on in its ruling Monday. Also, a coalition of environmental groups are pleading with the Obama administration to cancel the Bush policy. "If the Obama administration does nothing, it has busted the door wide open for destructive mining practices in other places," said Tom Waldo, a Juneau environmental attorney who argued the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. He said the ruling will allow any developer of a project -- from Pebble to a coal-fired power plant in the Midwest -- to get around federal water-quality standards by petitioning the U.S. Corps of Engineers to redefine its waste as fill material, Waldo said. ...(more@link)
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