Ice-cold wind sweeps through the factory buildings, snow covers the floors and the huge vats in which nickel was mined until 2020. After almost 75 years, the plant in the northwestern Russian town, about 200 kilometers from the port city of Murmansk and just a few kilometers from the Norwegian border, has finally been shut down.
Even by Russian standards, the pollution from the nickel smelter on the Kola Peninsula had reached such appalling levels that sulfur dioxide emissions were no longer sustainable. The toxic air contaminated the area south of the city in particular, where all vegetation died and the hills became a lunar landscape. Because of the environmental pollution, the country of Norway wanted to evacuate its residents in the border region.
The plant belongs to the large non-ferrous and precious metal producer Nornickel with a turnover of 15.5 billion US dollars. At the same time, Nornickel is one of the biggest polluters in the country. The company was recently sentenced by a Russian court to a record fine of the equivalent of 1.6 billion euros.
Not only in Nikel, but also in Siberian Norilsk, where nickel is also produced, more than 21,000 tons of diesel oil leaked from a tank last spring. Environmentalists spoke of the largest oil spill in the history of the Russian Arctic.
“The closure of factories that are getting old is a step in the right direction,” Yelena Sakirko of Greenpeace’s Russian branch told AFP.
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