An industrial city founded in 1935 as a slave labor camp, the Siberian city of Norilsk, Russia is the northernmost major city in Russia. After Murmansk, it’s the largest city above the Arctic Circle. It’s also the most polluted.
Right now, in June and July, the sun stays up all day, but the furnaces in the Nadezhda Metallurgical plant run round the clock all year long, smelting nickel and other ores and spouting a steady fountain of toxic, sulfurous smoke. Two million tons of sulfur dioxide per year since the 1950s. That they reported.
As a result, the Norilsk region is the home of the world’s largest pollution induced forest decline. For forty kilometers around the smelters, the soil contains 10-1000 times the normal background level of heavy metals.
As a result, the snow is yellow and black.
As a result, move to Norilsk to work, and your life expectancy will drop by ten years.
“Norilsk is the world’s biggest nickel and palladium producer, having overtaken Inco several years back. Since data first emerged from the ex-Soviet Union in the early nineties, it has established itself as one of the world’s single biggest ambient air polluters – if not the biggest. Indeed, despite early technological assistance from outside Russia (notably from Finland’s Outokumpu Oy), its contribution to the country’s sulphur dioxide burden has increased in relative terms.” Mines & Communities
“[Norilsk] is a city where the bus driver tells you, ‘If a Norilsk man gets sick in Moscow, the way to cure him is to move him closer to the car’s exhaust.’” Howard Weaver
“In my estimation, about 400,000 people took part in the construction of this complex. Due to the cold and the bullets, about one-fifth of them died,” Anatoly Lvov says. “At the same time, tens of thousands of volunteers worked shoulder to shoulder with the prisoners, and they object to those who say Norilsk was built on people’s bones. The prisoners who survived also are proud to have built this.” Howard Weaver
"In 1997, with the old combine in disarray, one of Russia’s richest men, Vladimir O. Potanin, bought its mines and factories and began a modernization that has cut the work force nearly in half, to 60,000, and jettisoned many of its obligations to support the city’s basic services." New York Times
“Officials say the environmental depths of Norilsk pollution was reached in 1984, but the plants even by official admission still emit many times the allowable norms and acid rain is killing hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and tundra nearby. Water pollution also is severe, with officials admitting to more than 100 polluted kilometers of river.” Howard Weaver
“The Norilsk Mining Companies… produce one seventh of all the factory pollution in Russia. Each year they churn out over two million tonnes in waste gas, and 85 million cubic meters of dirty water, according to the few figures provided by the Russian government. Its impact, ecologists say, is felt in Norway and Canada, and is killing off the forest tundra for hundreds of miles. Locals say the snow is yellow for 30 miles around the town.” Mines and Communities
“They took everything from me,” said Olga I. Yaskina, who was sent to the
Gulag in Norilsk in 1952 when she was just 16 for writing a letter to a friend in exile that said: “Don’t cry. The sun will rise for us again.”She never left after she was released from the prison camp three years later. Now 67, she receives a pension and works as a concierge at an apartment building, supporting herself and an unemployed son on little more than $300 a month.
She stays not because she wants to but because she has no better alternative. “I have nothing left on the continent,” she said.
"The [charitable donations] represent a “goodwill gesture” to the people of Montana from the Russian company that bought controlling interest in Stillwater Mining Co. in 2003. The donation marks ZooMontana’s largest corporate donation to date. Frank McAllister, CEO at Stillwater, said the idea was born when the company was in the midst of transactions with Norilsk two years ago.
“We were concerned about our image and needed to explain to the community exactly who Norilsk is,” he said.
Billings Gazette
Thanks to Dave Greten
My comment is why are the people still living and mining if the pollution is so bad. Is there a city or town call “Valek” if so how far is it from the city Norilsk,Russia.