How world’s worst polluter is still spewing poison
‘They’ve been dumping waste all around. No one would admit to it but everyone in town knows about it’
Arusty pipe churns out water along crimson banks of ore pulp near a power station. In the Russian factory town of Norilsk, industrial pollution has become so brazen and mundane that it took a spill of 21,000 tons of diesel fuel for the Kremlin to pay attention.
“They’ve been dumping waste all around,” says Vasily Ryabinin, Norilsk’s former deputy chief environmental inspector, who blew the whistle on his superiors.
“No one would admit to it but everyone in town knows about it.”
At Norilsk, The Daily Telegraph documented three major sites where trees and vegetation have been annihilated by long-term dumping of industrial waste.
Norilsk, 120 miles above the Arctic Circle in Siberia, is rated the world’s single biggest emitter of sulphur dioxide. Nornickel, a London-traded metals giant co-owned by billionaire Vladimir Potanin, controls Norilsk’s entire production cluster including dozens of facilities, from mining to smelting and refining.
Clouds of sulphur dioxide from the chimneys of the copper plant regularly hang over blocks of flats less than two miles away. The white gas is so toxic that standing for seconds by the plant’s main gate makes you cough.
But even locals, accustomed to environmental calamity, were stunned when a giant tank at a local power plant collapsed in May, churning out 21,000 tons of diesel fuel.
A few days after he filmed a local river with crimson water reeking of diesel, Mr Ryabinin put on his best suit and recorded a Youtube video to accuse the government of a cover-up.
“I can’t sleep at night,” a visibly nervous Mr Ryabinin said in the video filmed at a friend’s home. “It’s a crime against our children, our grandchildren, against all human life.”
A chemist by training, Mr Ryabinin spent more than a decade working at two governmental watchdogs as well at Nornickel’s operational safety department.
After he documented the crimson stream in the Daldykan River, nearest to Power Plant 3, he asked his bosses to let him take the helicopter further north to see if the spill had reached Lake Pyasino and the River Pyasino, which flows into the Arctic.
He recorded his video appeal and resigned after his bosses barred him from taking samples downstream.
“It’s like you see a crime happening, you see a spill, and they tell you not to go there. How can you work like this?” Mr Ryabinin told The Telegraph.
His former employer did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Nornickel, the world’s largest nickel and palladium producer which posted nearly £10.4billion in revenue last year, has blamed the incident on the thaw of permafrost, and maintains that the tank was in good condition.
Official records show that the company has listed the tank as being under repair since 2016, making it off limits for authorities. The company, in emailed comments to The Telegraph, insisted that the tank was checked in 2017-18 and concluded that the tank “could be safely put to use”.
Regional officials have blamed Nornickel for covering up the scale of disaster for several days, while Nornickel quoted communications between the company and officials to reject the suggestion.
Two weeks after Mr Ryabinin’s inspection, hydrogeologist Georgiy Kavanosyan crossed Lake Pyasino and sailed a few miles downstream on the Pyasina River to check official claims that the fuel was stopped before it reached the lake. His state-of-the-art equipment showed dissolved hydrocarbons in the Pyasino River at three times the normal levels.
Nornickel insists that “the spread of the diesel was quickly and efficiently contained thanks our first responders”.
These findings eventually pushed Rosprirodnadzor, Mr Ryabinin’s environmental watchdog, to admit that the fuel had spread much further and have said Nornickel needs to pay £1.5 billion in damages.
Nornickel accepts “full responsibility” for the spill but disagrees with what it called “gross inaccuracies” in how the watchdog estimated the damage.
Nornickel says it managed to catch 90 per cent of the fuel spill, quoting a Norwegian consultancy company that “confirmed that most of the diesel had been collected or had evaporated”.
Mr Kavanosyan finds the claim “preposterous”. “It’s not humanly possible to collect more than 50 or 60 per cent of the spilt fuel simply because light hydrocarbon fractions evaporate,” he told The Telegraph.
His calculations show that the containment booms that were installed 48 hours after the accident managed to catch the tail of the spill and that the diesel reached the Arctic’s Kara Sea two weeks later.
Three decades after the Iron Curtain fell, Norilsk is still a state within a state. Foreigners can enter town only by special permission of the FSB security agency.
The Telegraph visited three locations near Nornickel’s facilities where landscapes have been gutted by industrial waste in a clear indication that the fuel spill was merely one of many incidents of waste dumping.
Nornickel told The Telegraph that the dump was an “operating facility that complies with Russian laws”. Downhill from the site of the fuel spill, a stream of industrial water from the Nadezhda smelter gushes from a pipe along banks covered littered with rusty pipes. Nornickel has permission to discharge water here, a few miles away from the Daldykan River. The company says it has been paying the state for “the negative impact of any legal discharges it makes”.
Russian laws carry extremely low fines for environmental violations. It’s environmental watchdog conceded that it was often “easier for businesses to pay fines” than invest in environmental upgrades.
The amount of industrial waste that Nornickel dumps is hard to calculate compared with sulphur dioxide emissions from the city’s copper plant.
Last year’s report by Greenpeace said one out of 15kg of global S02 emissions comes from Norilsk. “This is an insane amount,” said Ivan Blokov, Greenpeace Russia campaign director.
Asked about the practice, the company quoted “enormous legacy problems” that it is working to address. “Nornickel accepts full responsibility for the incidents on its sites and its overall ecological footprint,” it said, adding that “the imperative is to do everything to clean up our sites… and ensure that such situations never occur in the future.”