Quotes from Arizona Daily Star:
In his 37-page decision, Soto hammered almost exclusively at the Forest Service’s approval of Hudbay’s plan to dump mine waste rock and tailings from its 955-acre pit onto 2,447 acres of nearby public land on the Santa Ritas’ eastern slopes.
Opponents’ lawsuits argued that only public lands directly above valuable mineral deposits are covered by the federal 1872 mining law’s definition of mining rights.
Soto wrote in his decision that for Hudbay to gain access to valuable copper, molybdenum and silver from the pit, the company would need to extract about 1.2 billion tons of economically worthless waste rock and about 700 million tons of mine tailings.
The Forest Service's primary error in this case was to accept, without question, that Hudbay's unpatented mining claims on those 2,447 acres were valid, thereby allowing them to be used for placement of the waste rock and tailings, he wrote.
Source.
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