VANCOUVER – Anti-mining protesters appear to have won their battle against the Romanian government and a Canadian firm planning to build Europe’s largest open-cast gold mine.
At least for now.
After more than a week of rallies in the capital city of Bucharest and the country’s second-largest city of Cluj Napoca, Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta said Monday the project likely won’t get approval.
A majority of Romanian parliament members weren’t in favour of the mine proposal for the northwest mountain community of Rosia Montana, and Ponta asked parliamentarians to vote quickly on draft legislation that would have moved the proposal forward.
“There’s no point in wasting time, I want to make sure that the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies vote on the rejection and then this project is closed,” Ponta said, according to Bloomberg News on Monday. “I don’t want the government to be responsible for contracts undertaken by previous cabinets.”
The state-run mine Rosia Montana was shut down in 2006, before the government shut down much of industry ahead of joining the EU.
Whitehorse, Yukon and London, England-based Gabriel Resources had hoped they would have approval for the Rosia Montana project by November, with plans for the mine’s first gold pour to come by late 2016.
The company is now considering its legal options.
“If the draft legislation is rejected then the Company will assess all possible actions open to it, including the formal notification of its intentions to commence litigation for multiple breaches of international investment treaties,” a statement from Gabriel Resources reads.
Activists, environmentalists and other anti-mine protesters took their issues with the open-cast mine and the use of cyanide in gold extraction to the streets for eight straight days, with between 8,000 and 10,000 people (estimates vary) rallying on Sunday, clearly swaying political opinion on a project that has been in the works for about 15 years.
Experts in mining and earth sciences say talk of using cyanide — a very toxic substance that is used to extract gold from ore in most of the world’s open-cast gold mining operations — often becomes the big issue, but it shouldn’t be the main concern.
What are the risks of using cyanide?
According to some reports, the project would use as much as 12,000 tons of cyanide annually. Gabriel Resources said the Rosia Montana mine would have a 16-year life.
UBC mining engineering professor Dr. Marcello Viega points out the word cyanide generally sparks fear in people because of some notorious incidences.
“It’s a perception because the name cyanide usually can cause a lot of fear, especially because of Jim Jones (the leader of a cult in Jamestown, Guyana where 909 people died of cyanide poisoning in a 1978 murder/suicide) or because the Omai accident (also in Guyana)… because of the Kyrgyzstan accident,” he says.
He’s referring to a 1995 incident at a Canadian-owned mine in Guyana, where more than 1.2 billion litres of cyanide solution spilled into the Essequibo River, and a 1998 spill at another Canadian-owned mine in Kyrgyzstan that reportedly sickened 600 people.
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