No changes are being proposed to the state’s quarry law, which has no limits on the size of the open pit, a fact that seemed to surprise some lawmakers. “One hundred acres may have been a typo,” said Loyzim. That’s down from the 100 acres initially proposed, but up from the 3 acres allowed under current law. The amended bill presented this week would allow developers who can prove they wouldn’t generate pollution to dig for metal-bearing rocks in open pits of up to 10 acres at any one time. “Maine is very unusual in the United States as a whole in having such a diversity of critical mineral deposits and potential for them,” geologist John Slack told the Monitor last month. The state has a number of deposits of crystals that could be similar to the ones in Newry, as well as rare earth elements and the country’s largest reserves of manganese. “We have to think of what somebody else might do down the line,” said Rep. Lawmakers were sympathetic to the Freemans’ desire to begin extracting the rock as soon as possible, but said they were trying to anticipate handling requests to dig out other critical minerals and metals, not just the lithium-bearing rocks in Newry. “Putting all this regulation on something that doesn’t require it is an extra stress.” The couple has already spent five years trying to develop the deposit, said Freeman. “But I just don’t understand why extracting spodumene from Plumbago North gets singled out for special rulemaking… if I extracted the spodumene and wanted to use it as road fill I would be allowed to do it now.” “We would have to live with it if that’s what it is,” said Freeman. That timeframe didn’t sit well with Mary Freeman, who was at the hearing on Thursday. The earliest that process might be wrapped up is at the end of 2024. The Freemans initially opposed the DEP bill, supporting others that would exempt spodumene, the mineral they want to excavate, from the mining law altogether.Īmending the mining act would take time, said Loyzim, since it would be considered a major substantive change, and would require public hearings and legislative approval. The DEP worked on the amendment to LD 1363 with the Natural Resources Council of Maine and Mary and Gary Freeman, whose discovery of the world’s richest lithium deposit, the news of which the Monitor broke in 2021, prompted the wave of proposed legislation. If a developer could prove that they could get a deposit out of the ground without polluting the surrounding land and water, the operation would be excluded from the Metallic Mineral Mining Act and instead likely be regulated under the state’s quarrying rules, which are much less stringent.Ĭhemical processing of a material would still be regulated under the mining act, which has strict standards for treating mine waste, known as tailings, that can be one of the most environmentally hazardous parts of an operation. The amendment, explained DEP Commissioner Melanie Loyzim, would create a “risk-based” exclusion in the state’s metallic mining law. Committee Chair Stacy Brenner said it seemed that legislators were “coalescing” around the bill, which has been amended since the committee last considered it. The committee voted to table the bill backed by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the Natural Resources Council of Maine, LD 1363. Sign up for the free newsletter to get important environmental news by registering at this link.Ī legislative committee tasked with evaluating a slate of mining-related bills made no recommendation on which one(s) to advance after a work session on Thursday, with members insisting they needed more time to weigh the proposals. Here's the non-static version, with the VC++ compiler with /O2.Editor’s Note: The following story first appeared in The Maine Monitor’s free environmental newsletter, Climate Monitor, that is delivered to inboxes every Friday morning. It's possible that something like cache locality in the static memory vs on the stack could make the difference. Really, you should profile the two options and see which is faster. The stack allocation is a little more expensive if you have /GS enabled in the VC++ compiler, which enables security checks for buffer overruns (/GS is on by default).
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