Industrial Pollution, The Kola Mining and Metallurgy Combine: Pollution cuts from Norilsk Nickel could quiet Norwegian rebels – by Charles Digges (Bellona.org – February 7, 2017)

http://bellona.org/

Norilsk Nickel head Vladimir Potanin announced plans to spend $17 billion in the company’s modernization during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin last week, about a quarter of which will go toward environmental improvement, by 2023.

The money would add up to a giant slash in sulfur dioxide emissions from the Kola Mining and Metallurgy Company that have been wafting in the hundreds of thousands of tons across the Norwegian border since before the fall of the Soviet Union.

In the meeting, which was described on the Kremlin website, Potanin reiterated promises that the company would slash emissions of sulfur dioxide by 75 percent from its Norilsk facilities in northern Siberia, and by 90 percent at its daughter Kola Mining and Metallurgy Company near Murmansk.

A spokeswomen for the company speaking with the Russian edition of Forbes later gave context to those cuts for the first time since these emissions slashing figures emerged: They would be reckoned against a baseline year of 2015.

So, how significant would the proposed cuts be for Northwest Russia and Northern Norway? Sulfur dioxide emissions from the Kola plants – once called Soviet Death Clouds, by the Norwegian environmental movement ­– have fallen since their Cold War peak of about a half a million tons a year.

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