South Africa police standoff with illegal gold miners escalates
The police sealed off access to the Buffelsfontein gold mine in Stilfontein several weeks ago to deny the miners access to food and other essentials.
A copper mine proposed for southern Arizona is stuck in limbo while federal regulatory agencies decide whether to grant the mining company a permit.
Canadian Business said Monday that Rosemont Copper is waiting for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to grant or deny a permit for the mine, located on a mix of private and public land in the Santa Rita Mountains some 30 miles southeast of Tucson.
Canadian Business says Rosemont Copper must obtain a permit from the corps to build diversion structures to reroute water now running in washes around various proposed mine facilities, including its open pit.
While the corps could legally deny the mine a permit, even though it is on federal land, the US Forest Service has “said several times since 2008 it cannot say no to the mine because of an 1872 Mining Law and other federal laws that support the rights of companies to mine federal land,” according to the story.
Rosement says on its website that the mine is expected to produce 221 millon pounds of copper per year, 4.7 million pounds of moly, 2.4 million ounces of silver and 15,000 ounces of gold by-product over a minelife of more than 20 years.
The property contains three copper/moly skarn deposits with proven and probable reserves of 546 million tons. Rosemont first started the permitting process in 2007 by filing a Plan of Operations with the Forest Service, the federal agency in charge of reviewing potential impacts and mitigation strategies.
3 Comments
Looselyride
it is being held up by liberal/moonbeam morons ………..
kayakguy
“Mired in Red tape”
Hardly. Water is of great practical concern in this area and is slated to become more so in the future. Mines use lots of the wet stuff and may jepordize future supplies.
Looselyride your “liberal/moonbeam morons” are citizens of the area who are concerned about their water supply, highway safety on the narrow winding highway the mine would fill with trucks, and the impact a large cooper mine would almost certainly have on surrounding communities. City Councils and County Board of Supervisors throughout the affected area oppose the mine. Since when does a non-citizen Canadian company have the right destroy American communities? Its a new kind of invasion and is only possible because of an antiquated mining law and the huge mistake America made when it provided corporations status as citizens.
No doubt when all is said and done the citizen groups will lose to the foreign corporation. But at least give us the opportunity to have our say (that’s called “freedom of speech” in America) and our day in court, another right enjoyed by legal American citizens.
RayofLight
Why is it I feel that if this were an American Company, the copper would be flowing by now.