Word: noranda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...techniques for extracting bullion from low-grade ore have touched off a little-noticed gold rush in the West, devastating huge areas, often at high-altitude sites that almost inevitably pollute the headwaters of rivers. A worst example in the making, environmentalists fear, is a gold mine that Noranda Inc., a big Canadian firm operating through a subsidiary of a subsidiary called Crown Butte Mines, intends to operate in fragile Montana high country 2.5 miles from the northeast corner of Yellowstone Park and entirely surrounded by the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness...
...Henderson, a hulk that bears old scars from open-pit mining. Digging petered out here in the 1950s -- as it happened, only a few feet short of the mother lode. Underneath Henderson, recent exploration has shown, are ore deposits said to be worth $1 billion. It is here that Noranda's subsidiary Crown Butte is pushing hard to start up a large 24-hour- a-day gold mine and processing mill. Workings would be underground and no cyanide would be used, but Yellowstone Park's director of resource management, Stu Coleman, has said that from an environmental point of view...
Baucus' letter, though it may stiffen the spines of the regulating agencies, probably won't be enough to stop the mine. Noranda and Crown Butte may well get a permit to operate. A draft environmental-impact statement is expected by summer, shepherded by the Forest Service and the Montana State Lands Department, two agencies generally considered to be pro-development. The fact is that the outdated 1872 mining law, which treats the U.S. as if it were an underdeveloped country to be exploited, does not allow the agencies to say no to a permit. They can say only "yes, provided...