#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. On the eve of the main summer holidays, Norilsk traditionally hosts a series of awards for the best employees of Nornickel enterprises. At a gala event in the Aika sports hall, 90 company employees received federal, regional and municipal awards.
The award ceremony was opened by Nornickel senior vice president, head of the Norilsk Division Nikolay Utkin. On the main professional holiday, he celebrated the achievements of a large workforce, emphasizing the incredibly important role of each employee in the development of Nornickel.
“With great pleasure I present well-deserved awards to our workforce for the successes and for the future of the company that we continue to bring to life! Your professionalism and your perseverance help us implement our development strategy. And this applies not only to production, not only to our flagship project at NMP, which will improve the quality of life in Norilsk, but also to the renovation that is being implemented in the territory. Metallurgist Day in Norilsk has become wider, we are building not only the company, we are building the city! Let everything work out for us, we are always winners, the future is ours!” Nikolay Utkin opened the award ceremony.
The deputy chairman of the Krasnoyarsk region’s Legislative Assembly Dmitry Sviridov stressed out the huge contribution of the company and its workers to the development of the city and the region:
“Today I express words of gratitude on behalf of the legislative power of the Krasnoyarsk region and want to emphasize: the company and its large team have very difficult long-term tasks, but we are absolutely confident that you will cope with them. Thanks to you and your work, the culture of production and the city will improve, budgets at all levels will be filled, and the Russian Arctic will develop. Norilsk, which once appeared around the city-forming enterprise, is a mountainous point on the map of our country, a supporting city on which the state places special hopes. I would like to thank you for your work, it is of very high quality and very demanding! And the further we move forward, the more significant it becomes on the national scale!”
Congratulating Nornickel employees on their main professional holiday, the head of Norilsk, Dmitry Karasev, emphasized that the city and the company are inseparable.
“It is very noteworthy that we celebrate these three holidays with a grandiose event – the grand opening of a memorial stele dedicated to the labor feat of Norilsk residents – home front workers, to everyone who brought victory closer with their efforts and labor during the Great Patriotic War! It is very difficult work to mine and smelt metal. Today, the company and the city, like many years ago, together continue the glorious work of developing our territory. Together we are building new houses, new educational, medical, sports and cultural facilities. And all this thanks to your work, your labor. This helps to increase the well-being of the city, the region and our entire country”.
The Nornickel’s Polar Branch enterprises in the metallurgical industry employ 4.5 thousand people. The stronghold of Norilsk metallurgy is the Nadezhda metallurgical plant named after B.I. Kolesnikov (NMP) and copper plant (CP). Both businesses are unique in many ways.
Thus, the raw materials processed at the plants – ores from the Talnah and Oktyabrskoye deposits – have no analogues in the world in terms of the diversity of mineral varieties. These deposits contain more than 35 percent of the world’s proven reserves of nickel, almost 10 percent of copper, about 15 percent of cobalt and more than 40 percent of the platinum group metals. It was precisely this rich raw material that determined the choice of smelting technology in Norilsk metallurgy, which is based on autogenous processes.
If we talk about NMP, this is the only enterprise in the Russian industry that uses flash smelting technology, and nickel production is the largest in Russia. Nadezhda’s two flash smelting furnaces account for approximately 15 percent of the world’s nickel production.
And the copper plant, in fact, gave birth to the unique domestic smelting technology – Vanyukov furnaces. It was in Norilsk that the new technology, not yet recognized by the scientific community, underwent pilot testing. After that, the world’s first two Vanyukov furnaces were built at the copper plant. From that moment on, the development and recognition by scientists and engineers of the Vanyukov’s innovative domestic invention uniqueness began.
The work of the predecessors is continued by today’s generation of metallurgists. Everyone makes a significant contribution to the development of the industry. Well-deserved awards were received not only by the workers of the metallurgical processing plant itself, but also by those who ensure their work: transport workers, repairmen. The award ceremony for Metallurgist Day at Aika was the first one in a series of festive ceremonies in Norilsk. Production workers were also honored at city venues, where almost 140 more Nornickel employees got awards.
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Text: Maria Ivanova, Photo: Nikolay Shchipko and Marina Peshkova
