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| The Battle Mountain Complex, first mined in the 1860s, is one of the most contaminated sites in Nevada. Newmont Mining Corp. bought the complex in the late 1990s and now proposes its Phoenix Project. |
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| Newmont will expand the existing Fortitude pit into the Phoenix pit. The rock is so acidic that the pit lake which will form would be toxic and violate Nevada's laws on pit lakes. Therefore, the BLM required Newmont to plan to backfill the pit. Unfortunately, the acidic rock put into the pit will pollute groundwater forever and the agency and company assume, without proof or even monitoring, that it will not. |
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| Seepage through these existing tailings pollute the groundwater with concentrations of copper being up to 2000 times the drinking water standard. |
Located 14 miles south of Battle Mountain, Nevada, in the Battle Mountain range, Newmont Mining, with the Bureau of Land Management's concurrance, proposes a mine which the Environmental Protection Agency argues will become a Superfund site. The problem is that most of the rock to be mined as ore and moved as waste rock is extremely acid producing. When sulfur in rock combines with air and water, it forms sulfuric acid. This acid leaches heavy metals from the rock and causes major pollution problems. The BLM predicts that acid mine drainage (AMD) will occur for 20,000 years.
Miners have coveted the site for more than a century. Mining began there in 1860 with millions of pounds of copper and thousands of ounces of gold being removed over the years. The legacy is that seepage through existing tailings impoundments and waste rock severely pollutes the groundwater. Very long-term, if not perpetual, treatment is needed at the existing site. Whether they mine it or not, Newmont has both the legal and ethical obligation to reclaim the site and clean up the pollution.
The BLM allows Newmont to propose to treat the polluted runoff forever. To do this, the BLM's mining regulations require the mining company to establish a trust fund to monitor and treat the pollution forever. The BLM estimated that only $408,000 was needed in a trust fund while the EPA, in a letter issued on the final environmental impact statement, calculated $32.5 million. GBMW's consultants calculated that the fund requires greater than $40,000,000. See GBMW's letter on the final EIS and GBMW's consultant's report.
Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr., ruled that the Bureau of Land Management has the authority to and must prevent substantial damage to public lands under the undue or unnecessary degradation (UUD) standard of the Federal Lands Management and Policy Act (FLPMA). Judge Kennedy issued the order in the lawsuit brought by Great Basin Mine Watch, Mineral Policy Center and Guardians for the Rural Environment (of Arizona) against the Bush Administration’s substantial weakening of President Clinton’s revised mining regulations (the 3809 regulations).