US judge refuses to block big lithium mine in NW Nevada
RENO, Nev. — A federal judge has sided again with the Biden administration and a Canadian-based mining company in a high-stakes legal battle with environmentalists and tribal leaders trying to block a huge lithium mine in Nevada near the Oregon state line.
U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno denied the opponents’ request last week for an emergency injunction to prohibit work at the largest known lithium deposit in the nation until the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals can hear their latest appeal.
Her ruling clears the way for Lithium Americas’ subsidiary Lithium Nevada to begin construction as early as next week at the mine they say would speed production of raw materials for electric vehicle batteries critical to combatting climate change.
Opponents say the mine would destroy key wildlife habitat and sacred cultural treasures, harm groundwater and pollute the air.
The conflict is driven largely by what Du described in her ruling as “tension” between environmental and economic trade-offs associated with efforts to speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. It also wades into evolving legal interpretations of a 150-year-old mining law.
Her new ruling marks the third time in two years she has refused to grant injunctions sought by the conservationists, Native American tribes and a Nevada rancher who lives near the mine 200 miles northeast of Reno.
Opponents argued in their request for an emergency court order last week that without it, the developer would begin to rip up a high-desert sea of sagebrush that holds some of the most critical habitat still intact for the dwindling sage grouse in the West.
Du said she denied the latest request because the plaintiffs were unlikely to prevail on an appeal challenging her Feb. 6 ruling that found the Bureau of Land Management complied with federal law — with one exception — when it approved plans for the Thacker Pass mine in January 2021.
Du said in the 11-page ruling that she understood when she issued her decision earlier this month that it meant “Lithium Nevada could start construction on the project, and thus disrupt the sagebrush ecosystem within the project area.”
Du said the government and Lithium Nevada argue that the project will “on balance, be environmentally beneficial because the lithium produced from the mine will enable various clean technologies.”
“And there is, if nothing else, a tension between the macro environmental benefit that could result from the project and the micro (relatively speaking) environmental harm that will likely flow from” allowing the mine to go forward, she said. “This court does not resolve that tension here.”
The environmentalists’ latest challenge centered on the reach of mining rights claimed under the 1872 Mining Law to neighboring lands where a developer plans to dispose of waste rock and tailings — in this case, 1,300 acres where waste would be dumped from an open pit mine.