Gold Futures: A PBS documentary of Canadian gold miner intimidation, psychological pressure, propaganda & forced relocation in Romania’s Rosia Montana

Canadian Gold Miner Gabriel Resources Stopped in Romania - puts 200 Million (usd) Investment in Peril

Background: In 2000 an Australian-Romanian gold mine caused a massive cyanide disaster that left the whole region poisoned for 20 years. The new company (Gabriel Resources) put out their own propaganda video "Mine Your Own Business" in which they point out that it's the Hungarians who try to stop Romanians from doing "development". They also assault George Soros who's a hero in Eastern Europe. The mining company tried using ethnic tension for monetary gain and in this part of the world this is very irresponsible behavior and shows that mining companies have no regard of indigenous cultures and would do anything to exploit local resources.

(For more of the same see: Canadian Mining Industry Run Amok )

Romania now plans to ban cyanide leach mining in the country which will extinguish the threat from predatory Canadian gold mining corporations for the foreseeable future.

Gabriel Resources faces another set-back as Romanian court deals new blow to Canadian gold miner's plans

BUCHAREST, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Plans for Europe's largest open-cast gold mine -- a multimillion-dollar project by Canada's Gabriel -- suffered a setback on Thursday when a Romanian court ruled a local authority had improperly approved an urban plan attached to the project.

The Alba Iulia Court of Appeals ruled that decisions by a municipal body in Transylvania were procedurally flawed.

The court is expected to expand upon its reasoning in a month's time.

In the meantime, Gabriel Resources faces another hurdle to opening the Rosia Montana gold mine in central Romania in which it has invested more than $300 million. The company has faced other health and environmental concerns over the project.

A key environmental review required for the project was suspended by the environment ministry in September following a court challenge by non-governmental organisations. "The ... court ... admitted the exception of illegality for the decisions number 45 and 46 regarding urban plans issued by the local council of Rosia Montana in 2002," said court representative Cosmin Muntean.

(NGOs are becoming a real problem for the mining industry: Barrick Gold Chairman, Peter Munk complains rogue Environmental NGOs are Destroying the Mining Industry )

He said the court is expected to publish the decision together with its reasons, in the next 30 days.

"From our point of view the (court's) decision does not affect either the validity of the mining licence nor the ongoing authorization proceedings for the project," a statement from Rosia Montana Gold Corp, an arm of Gabriel, said.

"While waiting for the court of appeals decision, our company reserves the right to refrain from comment or decide a step."

Marius Liviu Harosa, a lawyer for the environmental group which challenged the validity of the urban certificate, told Reuters the court's decision may invalidate the urban certificate, therefore, scuppering the process.

Officials have said a parliamentary bill to ban the use of cyanide in mining could succeed, thus blocking the project.

Gabriel has defended the use of cyanide in mining, saying it is not cost-effective to develop Rosia Montana without it.

However, opponents of the project, including members of the ruling centrist cabinet, say cyanide is hazardous and its use could lead to a repeat of a 2000 disaster in which a Romanian mine polluted rivers that flowed into Hungary.

(See: Cyanide Leak Heads Towards Danube Killing Every Living Thing In Its Path)

Here is the full article.

Cyanide Heap Leaching and Acid Mine Runoff - A Futaleufu River Valley preview?

This is the story of the struggle to save the famed Blackfoot River (memorialized in A River Runs Through It) from a proposed leach mine. It documents the enduring but sad legacy of mining throughout the state of Montana--cyanide-laced groundwater, acid mine drainage, and the failures of a boom and bust economy. It speaks from the hearts and minds of men and women who are fighting to save their vanishing heritage. Private property and the right to make a short term profit face off against the rights of future generations to experience the spirit, physical beauty, and health of the wilderness.

Canadian gold mining corporation, Gabriel Resources Ltd. halts Romanian project as support sours - NGO's influence cited

For Gabriel Resources Ltd., things were looking up until last spring.

After years of turmoil, the company's Rosia Montana gold project in Romania was proceeding well, with support at the local and government levels. There was ongoing opposition from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but work at the project continued despite their interference.

Then, around the start of June, the government abruptly changed its tune and grew hostile toward Gabriel, eventually suspending the permit-approval process at Rosia Montana altogether. That led to yesterday's announcement from the company that it is laying off most of its workers and cancelling a land-acquisition program.

Gabriel says it does not know exactly what caused the about-face by the Romanian government, which is led by a coalition of two parties: the National Liberal party and the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania.

"We've been told that we've been traded, that the ethnic Hungarian party wanted to stop our project, and the Liberal party wanted something else, and they traded us," Richard Young, chief financial officer, said in an interview. "We're not sure. But we've seen a clear sea change in the actions of this government."

He is not certain how much of an impact the NGOs had, but said there is "no question" that they influenced some stakeholders. Gabriel's situation highlighted the growing issue of political risk, which is affecting mining projects around the world.

Toronto-based Gabriel is trying to redevelop a deposit that has been mined on and off for nearly 2,000 years. The company has poured more than $300-million into Rosia Montana and has proved and probable reserves of 10.1 million ounces of gold.

Here is the full article.

Battle over gold mine plan that would create giant cyanide lake.

NESTLING amid rocky crags, lines of beech trees and chimney smoke rising from rustic cottages, Rosia Montana looks the very image of rural calm in the Transylvanian alps. In fact, this village has become a battleground in Europe's biggest single environmental struggle.

For 11 years, conservationists and a Canadian mining giant have been locked in a battle over £5 billion worth of gold sitting in the soil - Europe's biggest gold deposit.

It is a battle that has now reached its climax, with the company, Gabriel Resources, suing the Romanian government in the hope it will finally clear the way for mining to begin.

Gold has been mined at Rosia Montana since Roman times. The remains of their workings honeycomb the crags around the valley. The seams are now exhausted, but gold remains scattered across the valley in the form of dust. Put together, this dust amounts to 330 tonnes of gold and 1,400 tonnes of silver.

But gathering the dust is the problem. The only way to get at the gold is to soak the soil and rock with cyanide. This process, named cyanide leaching, dissolves the gold, but leaves behind a mountain of toxic sludge. About 20 tonnes of sludge are created to get enough gold to make a single ring.

"You can't even imagine how bad it will be, we are talking about the biggest ecological disaster in Europe," says Sorin Jurca, a leading light in the local conservation group, Alburnus Maior. "We are talking about a lake, a cyanide lake."

Gabriel Resources insists safeguards are being added that will see the valley landscaped and the toxic lake covered with a layer of clay. "We've got a solid project," says director Richard Young.

Conservationists disagree. Their movement has grown to embrace 80 organisations, including Greenpeace, the Orthodox church and the government of neighbouring Hungary, which will bear the brunt of any cyanide spill into local rivers.

Opponents and company have been deadlocked. But in September a new, minority government took office in Romania. Conscious of the country's deteriorating image in the West, it suspended consideration of an environmental permit for the mine.

Here is the full article.

Modern Mining Myths

Modern Mining Myths

Modern metal mining is producing a legacy of dead rivers, ruined landscapes, and groundwater dangerously polluted by heavy metals and chemicals. Ecological damage of this magnitude isn't just happening in countries with lax environmental regulations. It's also happening in the United States, despite environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act.

Part of the problem is that modern mining with its open pits, massive waste rock dumps and toxic processing chemicals has outstripped environmental and mining regulations. They simply weren't written to deal with massive open pits over a mile wide, mountains of waste rock and water pollution that can last 1000 years. And where regulations prohibited some actions, such as dumping tailings in stream drainages, industry has successfully gained exemptions to the law.

Another part of the problem is perception. Greenwashing by the mining industry portrays mines as strictly regulated facilities that temporarily use the land with minimal lasting effects. Public relations campaigns by industry trade groups, such as the Gold Institute, imply that with modern technology, mining nowadays poses little risk to the environment or public health. This article looks at two major mining components - cyanide leaching and "zero discharge" tailings impoundments - in an effort to explode these myths.

Cyanide - Mining's Poison Pill

Used to process both base and precious metals, cyanide is the reagent of choice at modern mines. 85% of the world's gold is produced through the cyanide leach process. Although acknowledging cyanide's acute toxicity (1 teaspoon of 2% cyanide solution will kill an adult) the mining industry maintains that accidental releases of cyanide are rare, but that when they do occur, impacts "are transient and the recovery of the environment occurs in a short period."

However, that claim is not born out on the ground; lots of mines leak lots of cyanide into ground and surface waters. In Idaho, the Grouse Creek mine had numerous violations discharging cyanide at levels two to five times higher than allowed. Even after mining ceased in 1997, cyanide continued to leak into nearby Jordan Creek at levels harmful to aquatic life. At the Beal Mountain, Kendall, Golden Sunlight and Zortman-Landusky mines - all in Montana - numerous cyanide spills and leaks contaminated drinking water aquifers and killed streams. These weren't transient effects. Because of persistent cyanide contamination, Pegasus Gold had to provide an alternative drinking water source to the town of Zortman, and Placer Dome bought out landowners downstream of the Golden Sunlight mine . In fact, Montana has so many streams and aquifers contaminated with cyanide from mining operations that, in 1999, a citizen's initiative to ban new cyanide leach operations passed by a healthy margin. Clearly Montana taxpayers, after watching their streams die and faced with a clean-up bill of close to $60 million, didn't buy industry's argument that cyanide doesn't cause long-term problems.

"Zero Discharge" - Fact or Fiction?

Most mines process millions of tons of ore a year. The consistency of wet cement, tailings are what's left over after the ore has been processed. Current practice for permanent tailings storage is to construct a dam across the mouth of stream, divert the stream, and dump the tailings in the drainage. At Ft. Knox, outside of Fairbanks, for example, over 1,000 acres of the upper Fish Creek drainage will be consumed by tailings.

See the full article at: Northern Alaska Environmental Center.

Making Gold Miners Pay

"Thanks, mountain!" says the grizzled old prospector played by Walter Huston, in the 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, after he and his young partners erase evidence of their digging before heading back to civilization, burros laden with gold dust.

Huston's benevolent gesture was a sentiment decades ahead of its time. Today, gold and other precious-metal mining companies are extracting bounties of ore, leaving behind scarred mountainsides, toxic acid-rock runoffs and waste-rock dumps — and although much of the damage is on public land, the mining operations, most of which are multinationals, are not required to pay royalties on precious-metals production, and many escape liability for environmental restoration.

That tradition may be about to change. Last week, as the price of gold hit a 28-year high and platinum prices set records, a new bill was being debated by the House Natural Resources Committee, which could force the mines to pay up. For 135 years, the mines have taken wealth out of the public domain under the protection of the General Mining Law — a let-'er-rip relic of the wild frontier past that allows mines to stake claims on almost any federal land. Since the law's enactment in 1872, the U.S. government has given away more than $245 billion in mineral reserves through patenting or royalty-free mining, says Rep. Nick Rahall, the West Virginia Democrat who is behind the new bill. Compare that, he says, to the $35 billion the Treasury has reaped from coal, oil and gas produced on federal lands between 1994 and 2001 alone. "So with that scenario," says Rahall, "we are indeed Uncle Sucker."

Rahall's bill would require companies to make royalty payments on "net-smelter" profits from ore mined off federal claims. Two-thirds of those collections would go toward remediation of the $32 billion in environmental mining damage already incurred in the U.S., and one-third to help local communities adversely affected by mining operations. "We're trying to put some fair return to the American taxpayer for the use of their land," says Rahall, the new chairman of the House Interior Subcommittee. "Whether it's coal or gold mining, there are social and economic impacts that are just the same, which is why we ought to be treating all these extractive industries the same."

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Indeed, in Montana's Little Rockies, a gold mining operation that was abandoned in 1997 after 20 years of cyanide leaching — a method of dissolving gold from ore rocks — is still polluting the area and costing millions in public funds to monitor and treat groundwater. Pegasus Gold, the Canadian mine operator, which has since filed for bankruptcy, paid no royalties on the gold it extracted from the area, and now the Ft. Belknap Tribes of Montana, whose reservations adjoin the Little Rockies mining district, says its surface waters are showing unacceptable levels of iron, arsenic, zinc and nickel. "Our biggest fear is that the [U.S. Bureau of Land Management] and the state will not have to provide enough money to run ... water-treatment plants after August 2008," says Dean Stiffarm, environmental liaison for the tribes. "There will be only enough funding to run them six months a year."

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But there are some in the industry who think the royalty will actually be a boon for business. Gold mining's biggest market, the jewelry retailers, support Rahall's bill saying that environmental responsibility is what more and more of its customers are looking for: at least 80% of gold consumed goes to the superfluous bling of human adornment, and some of those customers are feeling ethical pangs.

Tiffany and Co. CEO Michael J. Kowalski early last year signed onto the "No Dirty Gold" campaign launched by the mining-reform advocate Earthworks and has drawn most of the large retailers into supporting Rahall's reform effort. The last thing image-conscious companies like Tiffany want is to be linked to controversies such as that over conflict diamonds, portrayed in the movie Blood Diamond, nor do they want to be seen as callous parties to mining disasters. "Our customers were anxious to be assured that the metals and gemstones used in Tiffany products were extracted and processed in socially and environmentally responsible ways," says Kowalski. "We come to this, not as conservationists or environmentalists, but simply as business people who really are responding to market forces. So this is not about opposing mining; this is about supporting responsible mining."

Here is the full article.

Espolon Gold Mine owner, Kinross Gold Corp. to use Cyanide Heap Leaching in Alaska - Is this the future of the Futaleufu River Valley?

FAIRBANKS (Nov. 9, 2007) -- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is allowing a mining company to use large batches of the toxic chemical cyanide at the Fort Knox gold mine.

Fairbanks Gold Mining Inc. will use the chemical to lengthen the life of the mine by extracting fine particles of gold from extremely low-grade ore. The process is known as heap leaching.

A permit from the corps allows Fairbanks Gold Mining Inc. to start building a heap leaching facility at the mine, 26 miles northeast of Fairbanks. The permit allows the company to discharge waste into federal wetlands.

Mine officials estimate the heap leaching facility should extend the life of the operation by several years.

Fairbanks Gold Mining, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Canadian mining giant Kinross Gold Corp., originally expected Fort Knox to last until 2010. The heap leaching process should keep the mine active until 2014 and the processing facilities going through 2019.

The processing facilities will be around longer than the mine because Fairbanks Gold Mining has been stockpiling millions of tons of low-grade ore with an eye toward using the heap leaching pit to extract more gold.

Here is the full article.