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• reliance on other agencies to apply constraints which will forestall any potential problems. This is not an analysis, but rather a refusal to analyze, The practical effect of American Soda's response may be to shuffle agency relationships in a way that hinders the oversight required by law. Perhaps this reflects operational habits which American Soda has acquired under its prospecting permit. For example, as we have already noted above, the only statutory reference to a pilot plant places such a plant squarely in the context of the development phase of a mining operation. Solution mining is at most marginally addressed by the definition of prospecting which appears in the Colorado Mined Reclamation Act: "Prospecting" means the act of seazching for or investing a mineral deposit. "Prospecting" includes, but is not limited to, sinking shafts, tunneling, drilling core and bore holes and digging pits or cuts and other works for the purpose of extracting samples prior to the commencement of development or extraction operations, and the building of roads, access ways, and other facilities related to such work... C.R.S. § 34-32-103(12). A prospector has the advantage of being able to maintain the confidentiality of certain limited kinds of information, under Rule 5.2. Our review of the permit application, together with documents submitted to other agencies, leads us to question whether the protection afforded by Rule 5.2 has been exceeded. This is most clear in the context of information about the precise chemical aspects of its solution mining technique. Such process information is necessary for an independent observer to provide a thorough analysis of toxicity. The broad reading of prospecting is inconsistent with a narrow reading of the DMO/EPP requirements. On the one hand, the DMG is asked to stretch the boundaries of "prospecting," but on the other, it is asked to evaluate the Environmental Protection Plan based on a mining paradigm many decades old. In fact, one does not Gave to go far to find general evidence of toxicity. Tables 2-4 and 2-5 of the draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Yankee Gulch Sodium Minerals Project represent admissions on this point. For example, in Table 2-4, an evaporation pond pH of 10 and an inlet percentage of total dissolved solids of 20.5 qualify as toxic for most purposes. Similarly, Table 2-5 clearly lists "Hazardous Materials". [f one compares these tables with the injection fluids which will be authorized by the EPA pursuant to its Statement of Basis (at pp. 17-18) for the draft American Soda UIC permit, it seems clear that (1) many of the materials identified in Table 2-4 will be available for reinjection, and (2) fluids from sources which employ hazazdous materials will also be reinjected, despite the EPA's general admonition that injection of hazardous waste (as opposed to hazardous materials) is prohibited. Put in the simplest terms, it is quite clear that American Soda proposes to reinject toxic materials into the ground, and seeks as much operational latitude to do so as [he regulatory authorities will allow.