Legacy from LVRZ: oil mess in Ulan-Ude is in no hurry to move out
About twenty tons of oil waste and two billion rubles of damage to nature – such a legacy went to the capital of Buryatia from the Locomotive Car Repair Plant (LVRZ). Zheldorremmash and Russian Railways, responsible for the disposal of the phenol lake in Ulan-Ude, have been ignoring prosecutorial demands for several years.
Over eighty years, over eighty thousand tons of waste have been accumulated on the territory of the LVRZ, which include phenols, ammonium and oil products. These and other toxic substances were stored directly in the center of Ulan-Ude, creating the so-called phenol lake. The oil mess exists to this day, and responsible persons are in no hurry to get rid of it, although they create the appearance of their active work on this issue.
In October 2022, Deputy Chairman of the Government of Buryatia Evgeny Lukovnikov met with representatives of Russian Railways and Zheldorremmash JSC in Moscow. At the meeting, it was decided to start an ecological survey of the phenolic lake. According to Lukovnikov, specialists from the Moscow Research Institute, FSUE GosNIIOKhT, should have done this, and the results should have been prepared by the end of October 2022. But with the onset of the deadline, there was no progress in the elimination of the phenol lake.
In January 2023, the acting prosecutor of Buryatia, Mikhail Filichev, hurried Russian Railways and Zheldorremmash to start decontaminating the dangerous storage sump as soon as possible. Babr wrote about this earlier:
On February 14, a meeting was again held under the chairmanship of Evgeny Lukovnikov. This time, the Deputy Chairman of the Government of Buryatia focused special attention on the fact that GosNIIOKhT is delaying the preparation of the project roadmap. As a result, it was decided that the institute should develop it before February 17. Whether this was eventually done is unknown.
The roadmap should indicate all stages of the liquidation of the sump-accumulator. It was necessary to determine the initial data of the project, develop design estimates, and designate the design work. This process is expected to take eight months, and another two months for the environmental review.
Moreover, in this case, there is no intermediate stage in the form of public hearings. Although, it would seem, when solving environmental issues, one cannot do without the involvement of social activists and environmentalists.
The distance from the phenol lake to the Uda river is about one kilometer
Moreover, environmentalists were not invited to the February meeting. This was announced by the environmentalist and representative of the All-Russian Popular Front of Buryatia Evgeny Kislov, who is in charge of the elimination of the phenol lake.
At the same time, Russian Railways and Zheldorremmash at the last meeting managed to propose a new technology for the disposal of the sump, which provides for the upgrading of coal tar. To do this, it is planned to remove water from the sump, change the alkalinity and acidity of the medium, and remove solid particles. It is also known that the extraction of oil waste will take place in the winter on site, and their further processing – outside the region.
It is currently impossible to unequivocally evaluate the effectiveness of this method. Experts believe that the design surveys have not been completed in full, since the pollution of groundwater with substances that enter the Uda, a river in the Baikal basin, has not been taken into account. At the same time, it should be taken into account that the depth of migration of hazardous substances is so great that it is physically impossible to install a barrier that would block their entry into water bodies.
The further fate of the contaminated soil is also unclear – a vast territory that will remain after reclamation. Therefore, before adopting a new technology, it is necessary to check the project documentation very carefully.
It should be reminded that in 2005, after almost a hundred years of operation of the LVRZ, the discharge of hazardous technical liquids stopped on the territory of the plant. After nine years, the question was raised about the disposal of the formed oil lens, that is, the phenol lake.
In 2014, a part of the territory with a sump was acquired by Trans Logistic, which intended to dispose of it, but six months after the deal, the owner of the company died. Two years later, the Supreme Court ordered the authorities to get rid of the toxic lake and reclaim the land. However, Russian Railways and Zheldorremmash put the work on the back burner, knowing in advance that they would have to spend a lot of money on their implementation.
In 2019, a working group was created to coordinate the elimination of the phenol lake. In the same year, it turned out that the executives ripped off 172 million rubles allocated for the liquidation of the lake.
In 2020, Safe Technologies CJSC entered into an agreement with LocoTech LLC (which includes LVRZ itself), on the basis of which engineering surveys were carried out and an assessment of about twenty different technologies for neutralizing the phenol lake was carried out. Pyrolysis has become one of the proposed methods for utilizing the phenolic lake. To put it simply, in the center of Ulan-Ude waste of hazard class II would be burned for a couple of years. No one wanted to take waste out of the city because of economic losses.
In September of the same year, public discussions of design solutions took place. As a result, documents were forged in Ulan-Ude approving the dangerous method of liquidating the lake. That is, the published protocol had non-existent signatures in support of pyrolysis. And according to Yevgeny Kislov, during the meeting the issue of the phenol lake was not raised at all. The signatures themselves were impudently collected even before the hearings themselves.
In December 2020, the project documentation was sent for environmental review. But in June 2021, it became known that the project had not passed the examination. Since that time, the topic of recycling the phenol lake in Ulan-Ude has not moved forward.