"Six tribes in Southwest Alaska win legal challenge against the Donlin Gold Mine", 7 October
In a major victory for Southwest Alaska Tribes who depend on the Kuskokwim River and the surrounding lands and waters for their continued existence, a U.S. District Court in Alaska ruled that key federal agencies responsible for permitting the Donlin mine failed to fully consider the project’s harms in the environmental study for the project.

Specifically, the judge’s ruling found that federal agencies failed to realistically study the impacts to downstream waters and villages from a potentially catastrophic tailings dam failure. The mine developers are proposing to build a 471-foot-tall tailings dam to contain more than 500 million tons of toxic mine waste...

Judge... said the agency violated federal environmental and subsistence protection laws when it failed to assess the potential for a catastrophic tailings failure that could be caused by the massive gold mine.

The court will next decide, after arguments from the parties over the next five weeks, how to remedy this failure. Ordinarily, the court would strike down the permit, which is what the Tribes requested. However, mining interests are seeking to keep the permit in place while they remedy the flawed environmental impact statement and subsistence analysis.

Donlin Gold LLC, owned by the mining giants NovaGold and Barrick Gold Corporation, plans to build the massive open pit mine 10 miles north of the Kuskokwim River... If built, Donlin will be the largest pure gold mine in the world in a critical watershed that Alaska Native people in the region have depended on for thousands of years....