How Norilsk, Siberia, became one of the most polluted places on Earth
It was 2 a.m. and the sun was shining, as it does day and night in mid-July in Norilsk, a Siberian city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Igor Klyushin went to the bank of the river where he used to fish with his father for grayling, a sleek and dorsal-finned beauty known for its graceful leaps above the water surface. “A very merry fish,” Klyushin recalled. “It enjoys cold and clean, clean water.”
He doubted there would be grayling there that night, but if there were, authorities had long warned it was unsafe to fish for them in the Daldykan River.
And besides, he wasn’t there to fish. He began to record video of the clay-colored muck flowing downriver from somewhere beyond a railway overpass that is a gateway to one of the largest metal mining and smelting complexes in the world. The discolored water represented “the latest environmental crime of Norilsk Nickel,” Klyushin said in the video he posted on “Norilchane”— or “Citizens of Norilsk”—the YouTube channel he helps moderate.
The channel and its Facebook group, which has about 8,300 members, have become action alert sites, sounding boards and support groups for distressed citizens in Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world. The city of 176,000 has long been recognized by environmentalists—and even by the Russian Federation government—as one of the most polluted places on Earth, because of one business: Norilsk Nickel, the world’s biggest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel and a top producer of platinum, cobalt and copper. [Continue reading…]