#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The future construction scale was enormous. At first, Lesosibirsk was considered as a base for it, where the Norilsk matte had to be delivered along the Yenisey.
The history of the 1930s was repeated, when it was proposed only to mine ore and make semi-finished products in Norilsk. At that time the full cycle implementation in Norilsk – from ore to commercial metal – was defended by Avraamy Zavenyagin.
In the 1970s, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Alexey Kosygin, intervened in the matter and the metallurgical was build in the Arctic.
The fact that the construction started in the Far North, beyond the Arctic Circle, was far from being the main difficulty. The cost of building Nadezhda exceeded the cost of building the Bratsk hydroelectric power plant.
In Norilsk, the construction site of the current Nadezhda metallurgical plant (NMZ) was also not immediately approved. 14 different sites were considered.
As a result, the Second Nickel Plant was completely built on the site of the former Nadezhda airfield. The main reasons for this choice are a reliable rock foundation, sufficient site size (as a real metallurgical city was being built with workshops, household complexes, transitional galleries) and remoteness from the city.
In the History Spot’s previous publication, we told that Norilsk medicine began in a small hut.
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Text: Svetlana Ferapontova, Photo: Nornickel Polar Branch archive