In a measure environmental groups say will put 50 million Americans at risk of radiation exposure, Congress recently authorized storage of 50,000 tons of nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site. Opponent Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., dubbed the bill “Mobile Chernobyl,” because it funds the transportation of spent nuclear fuel rods from power plants in […]
State fights nuclear waste shipments
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Wolf wars enter next round
As the fallout settles from federal Judge William Downes’ decision ordering that nearly 200 introduced wolves be removed from Yellowstone and Idaho, members of the environmental community who have been at each other’s throats are putting aside their differences and preparing to appeal the decision (HCN, 12/22/97: Judge says wolf reintroduction was illegal). Immediately following […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
The Wayward West
Tension over logging the Taylor Ranch in southern Colorado continues. Costilla County sheriff’s deputies and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation haven’t found who sabotaged seven electrical power poles on the property last month. Ranch manager Vic White says someone with a saw severed three poles and cut the others three-quarters through. White calls the action […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
A road to nowhere?
For more than two decades, the Utah Department of Transportation has planned to widen the two-lane road that winds through narrow Provo Canyon. Best known as the site of Sundance, a resort founded by actor Robert Redford, the canyon is one of the most spectacular in the Wasatch Mountains. One-third of the “road-improvement” project is […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Protester starts her sentence
On Jan. 5, a former teacher began serving a 30-day sentence for refusing to part from a 400-year-old Engelmann spruce she was trying to protect from loggers. Joni Clark’s sentence of 30 days is the stiffest penalty yet for a tree-sitter in Colorado. She was found guilty of violating the Forest Service’s Special Closure Order […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Golden Dreams, Poisoned Streams
What is New Mexico’s hardrock mining reclamation law? Why was BHP Copper Co. allowed to dump untreated tailings in Papua, New Guinea’s Ok Tedi River, destroying local agriculture and the communities dependent on it? How harmful is chromium to a stream? You can find the answers in Golden Dreams, Poisoned Streams, the Mineral Policy Center’s […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
A ‘liberal’ court gets some breathing room
Western conservatives in the U.S. Senate tried to add language to a spending bill last fall to neutralize an old nemesis – the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But the senators, facing heavy opposition in the House of Representatives, had to compromise: a commission will review the appeals court system and the San Francisco-based […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Haggling over the Grand Staircase-Escalante
Conoco has turned its back on an oil well in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In December, Conoco engineers “packed up their oil rig and they are out of there,” says Bureau of Land Management spokesman Don Banks. “The hole has been capped without a blade of monument grass or a dollar of taxpayer green […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Dear friends
Reading into 1998 The bad thing about taking a break, which we accomplished by skipping the Jan. 5 issue, is coming back to a towering stack of accumulated papers from Western cities and small towns, as well as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Weekly. As we troll for story leads, […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Heard Around the West
Ski-hats off to 33-year-old Karen Hartley, the stranded Utah skier who kept warm for 18 hours on Christmas Eve by dancing in the dark and singing “old disco songs, show tunes, popular and current stuff, Christmas tunes and even camp songs,” reports AP. She never panicked; she kept her head, and when a helicopter arrived […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
…but let’s not forget about the past
Dear HCN, In your Dec. 22, 1997, issue, I was quoted as saying, “What it might take is for some people to die before people start sitting up and saying, ‘Take that pollution out of rivers.’ “ I didn’t mean by that there will have to be violent confrontations, or even that people will immediately […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Give the mining industry a second chance…
Dear HCN, As a thrice-starved-out Montanan, I have a different take on mining than writer Heather Abel in your Dec. 22, 1997, issue. There are aspects of mining and its politics that High Country News should not have glossed over. A prime example is the so-called Clean Water Initiative, I-122. It failed in the 1996 […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Is our love of the West destroying Chile?
I was drafting this essay, when Bill Brewster, former congressman from Oklahoma and now president of a Washington lobbying company, stuck his head into my office: “Do you know any companies that would be interested in buying gold concessions in Azerbaijan? Their Minister of Privitization is a friend of mine, and he wants to put […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
This reclamation plan uses waste to bury waste
Note: This article accompanies another feature story in this special issue on hardrock mining and reclamation. WELLPINIT, Wash. – At 7:30 on the evening of April 4, 1954, twin brothers Jim and John LaBret loaded a finicky $54 Geiger counter into Jim’s blue “46 Chrysler and set off on a moonlight mission to find uranium. […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Homestake shows how good a mine can be
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. MCLAUGHLIN MINE, Calif. – Homestake Mining Co.” s Ray Krauss ambles along the banks of a lake his firm built to supply water to its McLaughlin Mine in Northern California. He talks glowingly about his 17 years as manager of environmental affairs. First he […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
A radical approach to mine reclamation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. SILVERTON, Colo. – The Sunnyside Mine near here is an odd place for marking progress. The mine offers gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc, but has a treacherous history. Different companies have tried to make it work since 1874 and have shut it down […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Can tailings piles be historic artifacts?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. LEADVILLE, Colo. – Here below a ring of magnificent peaks, the scenery features a maze of tailings piles and the decaying architecture of mines, mills and smelters that outsiders might see as ugly and meaningless. But locals like Carl Miller enjoy the sight of […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Summitville: an expensive lesson
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In mine reclamation, lessons are learned through failure. Nowhere has the failure been more spectacular than at the Summitville Gold Mine in southern Colorado. The mine is being reclaimed now, but at a huge cost, borne almost entirely by people and companies that had […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Turning the Old West into the New West
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. ANACONDA, Mont. – Until this town got involved, mine reclamation was fairly dull. You could say, reclamation lacked imagination. No flair. Then Anaconda, a town that rose and fell on the smelting of ore from the mines in nearby Butte, got the idea of […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
A few plants love mine waste
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Gazing around old diggings just outside Yellowstone National Park, Ray Brown says, “The ecosystem hasn’t been damaged, it’s been destroyed. It’s typical on these sites.” Yet he points to a small grasslike plant and says enthusiastically, “This is the miracle!’ Brown is a plant […]