Feds Failed to Consider All Harms in Permit for Huge Alaska Gold Mine: Judge

A gold mine in a file photograph. Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP via Getty Images

Federal agencies failed to properly consider all harms associated with a planned new gold mine in Alaska, a federal judge ruled on Sept. 30.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Land Management violated state and federal law by failing to consider the impact of a major spill of tailings, or byproduct from gold extraction that contains chemicals like arsenic, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason said in her 36-page decision.

A storage facility proposed to hold tailings from the 16,300-acre mine would span 2,351 acres and could store up to 568 million tons of tailings. The tailings would be held back by a dam.

The final environmental impact statement from the federal agencies only detailed the possibility of a spill from the facility that represented 0.5 percent of the facility’s maximum capacity.

Federal lawyers defended the move, asserting federal law does not require agencies to “examine the environmental impacts of ‘remote and highly speculative consequences.’”

Evidence filed in the case, though, shows a larger spill is “reasonably foreseeable,” Gleason said, including a 2011 presentation that analyzed studies found, on average, that tailings released because of dam breaks represented 20 to 40 percent of the total volume of tailings held in storage.

According to the judge, the Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental Policy Act—which requires agencies to study the environmental impact of proposed projects—by failing to consider larger spills and by declining to assess how a catastrophic spill would play out.

The Bureau of Land Management violated a state law that is similar to the Environmental Policy Act by not assessing a larger tailings spill, according to the ruling.

The Army Corps of Engineers declined to immediately comment on the decision. A Bureau of Land Management spokesman told The Epoch Times in an email that the agency does not comment on litigation.

Tribes in Alaska that brought the case celebrated the development.

“This victory is incredibly important to our Tribal members who have been on this land for almost 10,000 years,” Walter Jim, chairman of the Orutsararmiut Native Council, said in a statement. “The threat of the Donlin Gold Mine has loomed for many years now, posing unacceptable risks to the health of our lands, waters, fish, wildlife and our people. We are relieved and happy that the judge is requiring a harder look at the mine’s impacts, and the risk of a tailings failure.”

The location of the planned mine is 10 miles north of Kuskokwim River.

Gleason declined to immediately order the parties to take action based on the ruling. She is instead allowing them to file supplemental briefs outlining what they think should happen.