The Debate Over A Century Old Law — страница 7

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(Boyle 52). One of the worst examples is the Clark Fork River Basin in Western Montana. This now abandoned mining and smelting operation has left large ponds loaded with arsenic, copper, lead, zinc, cadmium, and silver. Rivers that passed through the Clark fork area. show signs of this contamination at ten times the normal level, two hundred and forty miles downstream. Cyanide is one of the major problems facing federal cleanup crews, as it is used in the leaching process of most modern gold operations. A forty-six acre pond with a cyanide/water mixture in Southern Colorado’s Summittvile Consolidated Mining Company’s gold mine was leaking at over one hundred gallons a minute. Killing aquatic life at least seventeen miles downstream before a one hundred thousand dollar fine

was levied and treatment of the water began (Hocker 26). Eventually the company went bankrupt and the federal government took over the forty thousand-dollar a day clean up (Begley, Glick 67). Posting cash bonds (an up-front security deposit to cover the potential clean up of the mining site) along with royalties to ensure environmental clean up of mining sites is necessary to help slow environmental damage, even at the expense of some marginally profitable operations having to go out of business. While most of the larger mining corporations will be able to absorb the added expenditure of the bonds and royalties, it is break-even operations that may be put out of business. A single person business or recreational prospector could hardly afford to post a six thousand-dollar to

twenty-five thousand-dollar cash bond to keep alive a weekend hobby (Barol, Zuckerman). Both the federal government and the mining industry will need to compromise if they are ever to come to an agreement on this issue. Yet, the federal government needs to keep the upper hand on this issue, because if they don’t, the mining in 34a