There was something fishy about the whole process. I bought Taseko shares when the feds first denied them the permit, thinking that they had a plan b in a drawer somewhere and would dust it off and present it, taking into consideration why plan a had failed, but I sold the shares when their resubmitted plan was just slightly and mostly cosmetically different from the plan that had been rejected.  I made a couple of bucks, which was nice.
The deposit is enormous.  It will be cheaper to use Fish Lake as a tailings pond, but they could access the ore in a more environmentally sustainable way if the economics are there.  Somehow they figured they had enough of a pull with the last federal government and current provincial government to not bother putting together a viable plan.