With gold hovering near $1,000 you would think gold miners would do what ever it takes to stay in production at this profitable moment.
But Jerritt Canyon in northern Nevada just got shut down again by Nevada environmental officials. The company had committed to having its new, state of the art mercury control system up and running my May 30.
It didn’t, AP’s Scott Sonner reports in BusinessWeek, and the state of Nevada is holding the company to its words.
Idaho Conservation League program director Justin Hayes, whose dogged efforts to reveal the hundreds of pounds Jerritt Canyon and other gold mines were sending into the atmosphere toward Idaho, was not happy when Nevada allowed the company to begin production in March based on its commitment.
Hayes and the state of Idaho’s advocacy convinced the Environmental Protection Agency and Nevada to go to a mandatory mercury control program for gold mines, the first in the country and the world.
Now EPA is writing national mercury standards for gold mines with an August deadline. That could affect Idaho but the place that faces the biggest change might be Alaska, where gold mine industry officials are raising the same kind of questions Idaho industry raised earlier this year.
You might remember the effective lobbying effort of the Idaho Association of Industry and Commerce, the Idaho Council on Industry and Environment and Monsanto Corp, whose P4 phosphate plant in Caribou County in Southeast Idaho is the state’s largest mercury source. They said the science linking a source like the P4 plant to high mercury levels in fish in nearby reservoirs was not yet clear enough.
Since then the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality has done a survey of large rivers that has not yet been completed. And the Department of Welfare has issued a statewide alert warning children under 15 not to each more than two meals of bass caught anywhere in the state.