[Old School]

Again you keep spitting out the same BS, I dont like MTR, I am totally against ILLEGAL valley fills, I am not against all mining.

a lot of people from the pro-mtr side, and the "Friends of coal" nutcases, keep trying to persuade people the anyone against MTR is against coal and wants to take coal miners jobs. Which isnt true, machines and the practice of MTR has taken away more jobs from miners than any environmentalist will do.

And I wasn't talking about the 1998 West Virginia ruling, which under the proposal of the Clinton administration and the EPA, was used throughout Appalachia beginning in 2000. The ruling I was talking about was completed in may 2002, The bush administration changed the definition of fill material, and they changed the ruling on how and where this material could be placed. They changed many other things also like downgrading the label of "Hazardous" on mercury pollution from power plants, which gave power plants 15 more years to implement better controls, they also changed a ruling that made high level radioactive waste "incidental", which saved the government the time and money it takes to clean it up.

The ruling on the "fill material" consisted of the same type of tricks, one which is still ongoing, the "clarification" of the stream buffer rule. They also changed many of the rulings under the CWA from "discretionary" to "non discretionary", minor word changes that have major effects. They also changed the limits on the size of new MTR sites. I have mentioned this rule change at least a dozen times, and then you bring up a ruling from 1998, that was only in WV, and has nothing to do with Kentucky, or this topic.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn...ge=printer

You say that your against illegal valley fills, but yet as I understood your previous post you said valley fills were legal prior to May of 2002 and are now illegal because of the 2002 rule clarification. Yet all of the anti-mining groups like OHVEC, Kentuckians for the Commwealth, Seirra Club and many others were claiming valley fills were illegal over 12 years because they violated the Clean Water Act which brought on the lawsuit in 1998.

Again you claim that your only against MTR and not all mining, but yet you are against illegal valley fills (which in my opinion all valley fills are 100% legal). I've also said on several occasions that if coal companies were not allowed to place material into valley fills, they would be out of business, which you claim is BS, brings to me this point, let's assume for the moment that valley fills were ruled illegal and could not be used by the mining industry. Let's assume a coal company wants to start a contour mining operation (which in the past you've said your ok with contour mining), assuming the permit calls for moving 100 million cubic yards of overburden and keep in mind that the overburden swells about 25% which would bring the total overburden to 125 million cubic yards, now you only able place about 80% of the original 100 million cubic yards back on the strip bench where it came from that leaves 20 million yards from the original yardage plus another 25 million yards from the swell which brings the total to 45 million cubic yards. Where will that additional yardage will go to?

Let's consider underground mines, whenever you make a site for underground mines you have to build roads and move overburden for the portals. Where will you place all of the overburden? Then you have slurry impoundments, I'm sure that if the coal industary wasn't allowed to build valley fills they surley would not be allowed to build slurry impoundents either. Where would coal companies place the rock that is removed from the coal when its processed through the prep plant?

This is why I said if your against valley fills then your against all types of mining and not just MTR because as I said earlier valley fills are used in every type of mining.

Now tell me haw can the coal industry operate surface or underground mines without the use of valley fills?