For miners today’s ruling by the US Supreme Court is probably the most significant of the year. I refer to the ruling in Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. The details are readily available at this link. It boils down to the simple fact that tailings are fill and their discharge into waters of the United States is governed by the US Army Corp and not the US EPA. If they move fast enough, Couer Alaska Inc. can now get their mine going and put the tailings into Lower Slate Lake in Alaska.
But they had better move fast for there is an uproar on the horizon. The Bush administration changed the definition of “fill material” so that it is not considered a pollutant and this ultimately is the basis of the Supreme Court ruling. Now politicians are moving to reverse the Bush administration ruling and have fill reclassified as a pollutant. I quote from the linked report:
Environmental groups decried the decision, which they asserted could affect waterways across the country. “If a mining company can turn Lower Slate Lake in Alaska into a lifeless waste dump, other polluters with solids in their wastewater can potentially do the same to any water body in America,” Earthjustice President Trip Van Noppen said. “The good news is that the problem is reversible. It was caused by a Bush administration rule reversing 30 years of successful regulation under the Clean Water Act. We call on President Obama to act immediately to repeal this rule and restore the original intent of the Clean Water Act.” In March, Reps. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) introduced legislation to reverse the 2002 rule change that altered the meaning of “fill material” under the Clean Water Act. The bill would revert to the Clean Water Act’s original definition of fill material as “any pollutant which replaces portions of the waters of the United States with dry land or which changes the bottom elevation of a water body for any purpose.”
And Coeur Alaska would be back in court or unable to fill Lower Slate Lake. Sitting in Canada right now, it is hard to get worked up about filling another lake; there are so many here, and so many are used for tailings. Plus my personal opinion is that there is no better place for tailings than at the bottom of a deep body of water. Afterall, nature and erosion will take all tailings there in the fullness of time.
The fight over whether to put tailings in big on-land piles or in deep waters (lakes and/or the sea) is as old as I can recall. In the early 1980s I attended a conference in Sitka on the issue and even presented a paper which is now in a long-lost volume. It was not a profound paper; nor for that matter were the other papers; they all reflected the prejudices of the authors and the organizations for which they worked. But the sad part is that no headway has been made since then; there is still no consensus; emotion rather than reason still prevails. And now law and dubious politics is once again rampant in what is ultimately a significant environmental and engineering issue.
Perhaps the mining associations should avoid sanctimonious statements about the benefits of jobs accruing from this decisions—the court did not even consider that issue. Maybe the mining associations should once again convene an open forum of opinions and experts to openly and honestly consider the engineering and technical issues—including my favorite, namely long-term geomorphological stability and landform change.
