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Golden Sunlight Mine
The Golden Sunlight Mine (a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian mining giant Placer Dome) is one of the largest cyanide-leach open-pit gold mines in the world, which began mining the south flank of Bull Mountain near Whitehall, Montana, in 1975.
Golden Sunlight Mine Hearing Set
(Click on images to enlarge.
All images taken on a Lighthawk flight.)
[April 2010]
A court hearing in MEIC’s two-decades-long effort to force the State to comply with the Montana Constitution’s requirement that “all lands disturbed by the taking of natural resources shall be reclaimed” is scheduled for April 14th in State district court in Boulder, Montana.
At issue is the Department of Environmental Quality’s approval of a final reclamation plan for the mine that requires no reclamation at all on 158 acres of the massive pit near Whitehall. None.
This mine has a sordid history that includes a 19-million-gallon spill of cyanide-laced water (no enforcement action was taken by the State) and an engineering fiasco that caused the earth to move beneath the 900,000 gallon vats in which the ore is processed with cyanide to remove the gold. The mine was shut down for months while the land was stabilized. And again, no enforcement action was taken by the State.
MEIC, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Gallatin Wildlife Association first sued over reclamation of the Golden Sunlight Mine in 1991 making a very simple argument: “All” means “all” in the above cited language from the Montana Constitution. In earlier rulings in this case, now retired Helena district judge Thomas Honzel wrote: “the language of Article IX, Section 2, does not exempt open pit mines from reclamation.” He also noted that “this constitutional directive to reclaim all Montana lands that have been disturbed due to extraction of natural resources is unqualified.”
However, after each ruling against the State and the mining company, the Montana Legislature changed the law retroactively at the behest of Golden Sunlight. That required MEIC and the other plaintiffs to amend the suit and resume the challenge. Each time the groups won.
Then, when a legislative fix was no longer available, the company appealed to the Montana Supreme Court, arguing that the Constitution did not really mean what it says and that a new environmental impact statement should be prepared before the company was required to backfill the pit. The Supreme Court deferred to DEQ, which said it was already preparing a new EIS. After the EIS was completed, the Court ruled the appeal moot.
Predictably, DEQ adopted the same old reclamation plan, defending its decision by saying that reclaiming the entire mine would cause an unacceptable risk to the Jefferson River. The fallacy of this argument is that the mining company must already treat the polluted water flowing from the mine property “in perpetuity.”
What is really at stake is the cost of reclamation. If the mine is allowed to leave the 158 acres despoiled, the cost to the company will be around $1 million. The cost to fully reclaim the mine is estimated to be $65-80 million. It appears that, once again, the cheap—though illegal—option is being selected.