I own a mineral deposit in a central Nevada mining district, though not with any intent to exploit it. I am quite familiar with the regulatory details of mining in the US. It is very different than the caricatures spoon-fed to the public by activist organizations.
Environmental impact studies are fine and necessary. Archaeological impact studies are mostly bullshit; the region is littered from end-to-end with artifacts leftover from the Lake Lahontan civilization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Lahontan), you can find stuff everywhere if you know what to look for. So everyone just pretends that there are no artifacts.
There are two big problems that really make it impossible to profitably mine US deposits. First, there is an environmental lawsuit industry that thrives on delaying the opening of mines until the companies run out of money to deal with them. The lawsuits are mostly bullshit about hypothetical habitats for endangered species and the like; they aren't credible, but that isn't the point and some courts are willing to entertain them indefinitely.
Second, a big problem is that if you pick up a rock, you own it. In the western US mining districts, those rocks are laden with natural concentrations of all sorts of low-value heavy minerals that are magically transformed into "toxic waste" the minute you touch it. This has arguably been the biggest killer of new mining. The obligation to scrub natural mineral formations of elements with no economical value very substantially increases the cost because you end up "mining" metals that have no value. This is particularly problematic for things like rare earth metals -- the mineral complexes are intrinsically "toxic waste" under standard regulatory regimes. It doesn't matter that they are natural, the mining company is obligated to treat nature as a superfund site.
Regulations regarding arsenic in the water have been similarly exploited by environmental activist groups to shut down mining. In many places in the western US, the background levels of arsenic in the groundwater is naturally several times higher than the EPA limits because of the local mineral formations. The way it works now is that if you do mining near those formations, you become responsible for bringing the natural background levels within EPA guidelines -- a fool's errand. So mining companies avoid areas where the local arsenic levels exceed EPA guidelines, lest they become responsible for cleaning up arsenic they didn't produce.
Environmental activists have very cleverly created a regulatory framework that holds mining companies responsible for natural mineral distributions even if the mining companies are in no way responsible. This has effectively outlawed heavy metal mining in the western US because the environment is naturally full of heavy minerals.