#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources Svetlana Radionova is on a working visit to Norilsk today. She has already visited several Nornickel Company’s objects: Taimyr fuel company’s Kayerkan oil base, saw how the reservoir was modernized, then visited the emergency diesel fuel’s storage where a spill occurred in May 2020.
Also, Svetlana Radionova visited the Sulfur Program’s show-room, inspected the construction site at the Nadezhda metallurgical plant and flew over the Ambarnaya river to get acquainted with the flood.
Svetlana Radionova said:
We see huge changes. Nornickel has done a great job, but the accumulated damage’s amount is so huge that the company is still at the beginning of its journey. We understand that another 20 hectares of disturbed land and seven hectares contaminated after the accident will have to be reclaimed and cleaned up. We see the accumulated damage, but Nornickel eliminates it, because the company made the appropriate conclusions, and it was a very difficult and expensive situation for it. And the fact that after the Nornickel Company paid off, it found an opportunity to continue spending money on the environment, says that the company has come here for a long time.
After the visit to the production facilities a meeting on environmental safety was held in the Norilsk Administration where two agreements were signed: the first is on standard interaction on the information exchange between the Nornickel Company and the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources, the second relates to business consulting on new environmental projects.
Svetlana Radionova said:
The first agreement provides for an open and transparent information exchange on the current environmental situation. For example, today we discussed the integrity of your pulmonary tubes and the very manifestations that have accumulated as the damage result. It is very good that the Company now works openly without hiding anything.
Commenting on the second agreement based on the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s instructions to the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources, Svetlana Radionova explained:
This is an experimental and first of its kind agreement. We are the first of the oversight bodies who can provide business consulting in complex projects, usually these are new or reconstruction projects. And Nornickel was one of the first to ask us to conclude such an agreement. We will show the Company all the developments that are seen on other platforms, will provide our specialists, and we will be able to exchange views online. We will present at commissioning activities and during their implementation in the future, discuss the weaknesses that can be during construction or operation. We will accompany the project from and to with all the forces we have, with all the accumulated technologies that are passing environmental expertise. This will help the Nornickel Company to save a lot of time and, I hope, money, and us to get new experience and share it with other companies.
She added that the Company is also provided with the administrative procedures with full support: the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources speeds them up, corrects documents, points out shortcomings and errors without returning documents and constant failures which helps to reduce time.
The Nornickel’s senior vice president – operational director Sergey Stepanov commented:
The consulting agreement is very important to the Company because it gives us the opportunity to get information from the most qualified body in the country in this matter before we do anything. This is especially true for the reclamation project. Today’s agreement is a reserve for five to seven years ahead taking into account the reclamation program that we have conceived.
The Nornickel’s vice-president for federal and regional programmes Andrey Grachev said:
Probably we and the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources are pioneers, because this agreement legitimizes our relationship on consulting on various issues related to environmental projects. This applies to assistance in the peer review, in our environmental plans’ evaluation. And here the Company together with the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources does it for the first time in the Russian history. We know that the Government is preparing a resolution on this topic, it has not been signed yet.
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Text: Ekaterina Maksimova, Photo: Marina Peshkova
