U.S. court no to Kensington Gold Tailings project

A COURT of Appeals in San Francisco issued a temporary injunction against some construction activities at the Kensington Gold mine site in Alaska. The appeal was filed by environmental groups Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and the Sierra Club, who only recently lost an appeal that challenged Coeur�s environmental impact permit, which was issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The Kensington project has had bad press with criticism by Oxfam and Earthworks-backed �No Dirty Gold� campaign for the manner in which it plans to dispose its waste. While the company maintains that no cyanide will be used on the construction site during the gold extraction process, making it safe to dump the mine tailings into the nearby Lower Slate Lake, environmental groups argue that there are viable alternatives for storage of the mine waste.

Alternatives included a process known as dry stack tailings disposal, where the tailings are dried and stacked in a pile on the ground. The recent temporary injunction will only impact work in the tailings facility area.