!["rosatom" and 17 tanks: another "rescue" usolye from hazardous waste 2 rosatom and 17 tanks another rescue usolye from hazardous waste](https://ruscrime.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Rosatom-and-17-tanks-another-rescue-Usolye-from-hazardous-waste.jpg)
“Rosatom” and 17 tanks: another “rescue” Usolye from hazardous waste
In mid-February 2023, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Victoria Abramchenko pompously announced in her social networks: “Usolekhimprom’s site in the Irkutsk region has been freed from the most hazardous waste!”
Allegedly, the Federal Environmental Operator (enterprise “Rosatoma”) found 17 emergency tanks with mercury waste at the industrial site. As a result, they were extracted by the good forces of the FEO in compliance with the established safety standards and refilled into special containers.
“Now they are completely removed from the site! They were taken to specialized enterprises for disposal in accordance with all the rules. They no longer threaten the inhabitants of the city of Usolye-Sibirskoye and the ecosystem of the Angara River. I believe that this is a great victory in preventing an environmental disaster and an important stage in the transformation of the site into a territory with good economic potential,” writes Abramchenko.
Now let’s figure out what is true and what is false.
Recall that “Rosatom“took Usolye-Sibirskoye under his wing in 2020. Then an emergency regime was introduced there due to the threat of leakage of hazardous substances from the abandoned Usoliekhimprom enterprise. The President of Russia instructed the Government to develop an action plan for the neutralization and elimination of all accumulated waste and cleaning up contaminated areas, which has entered the active phase of implementation.
Thus, the plans for Usolye include the completion of “dismantling and demercurization of the structures of the mercury electrolysis shop” (this is the main source of pollution). Bring five emergency containers containing waste of hazard classes I and II to a safe condition, and dispose of them a little later. Make protective screens along the Angara coast. Eliminate the first three wells for deep waste disposal, mothball 12 wells.
What did the feds manage to do in almost three years of work?
For ₽400 million, the dirt was shifted from one tank to another, and a lot of words were said about “demercurization” and “monitoring”. That’s all. There is still no answer what to do with the disposal of almost 18 thousand tons of waste extracted from the brine wells, what to do with 30 reactors with the most dangerous chemicals, there is no answer.
And now they are again talking about some 17 tanks, which again were simply refilled into other containers. That is, in fact, nothing has been done.
In the meantime, it became known that a statement was prepared in the name of the head of the investigative committee of Russia, Alexander Bastrykin, in which Usol residents demand to deal with violations of environmental, sanitary-epidemiological, urban planning and land legislation in the elimination of accumulated environmental damage at the Usolekhimprom industrial site and the choice of a place to accommodate ecotechnopark “Vostok”. You can read about the latter here.
Residents of Usol claim that the state of the environment has deteriorated. This is confirmed by the results of the analysis of Rospotrebnadzor, which were published in the report “On the state of sanitary and epidemiological well-being of the population in the Irkutsk region in 2021”:
“The frequency of identification of 1,3-dichloropropanol-2 in the blood of children increased 3.5 times, especially those attending children’s educational institutions located closest to the industrial site; sensitivity to mercury increased by 9.5%,” the report says.