Proposed rare earth strip mine in Belle Fourche watershed taps DoE

Missouri Buttes and Mahto Tipila at sunset 

A strip mine intended to remove Bull Hill from the headwaters of the Beaver Creek drainage near Mahto Tipila (Devils Tower) in the Bearlodge Ranger District then replace it with a pile of waste rock could pollute the Belle Fourche and Cheyenne Rivers even worse than they are now. 

In January of 2016, the US Forest Service suspended the Draft Environmental Impact Study for a Wyoming Black Hills mountaintop-removal mine that would extract minerals containing elements like neodymium and praseodymium from the Belle Fourche watershed. 

In 2017 Rare Element Resources said its mine just upstream of the South Dakota border announced financial backing from General Atomics and applied for enough water for the mineral separation process despite widespread contamination in Crook County wells. Acid mine drainage can kill or cause birth defects in the birds and mammals that happen into contaminated standing water on these sites. 

Wyoming Senator John Barrasso and the other Earth raping Republicans are working overtime to defund environmental protection, especially on public lands. The US is beginning to get religion on existing rare earth stocks and we have more buried in landfills than all other developed countries combined. Japan recovers most of her needs from the waste stream. 

A demonstration-scale separation and processing plant is expected to cost $35-40 million and a site in Upton, Wyoming near the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) is a prime candidate but the Biden Administration could reverse that funding.

An announcement from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has increased the likelihood that Crook County will one day host its own rare earth mine in the Bearlodge Mountains. Rare Element Resources has been awarded half the funding needed to construct the demonstration-scale plant that represents the next step forward in developing the project. A formal proposal was submitted to the DoE in mid-2020 to secure funding for a separation and processing plant that uses RER’s proprietary technology to produce commercial-grade products. [Sundance (Wyoming) Times]

Earlier this month the South Dakota Board of Water and Natural Resources gave formal support for a US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant to continue the $4.3 million ninth phase of the Belle Fourche River watershed implementation project. It's designed to mitigate agricultural and livestock damage in sensitive riparian zones even as Republican Governor Kristi Noem ends environmental protection in the red moocher state.