Siberia will take more than 10 years to recover from the thermal power plant spill

• Environment: Federal emergency in Russia for the spill of 21,000 tons of diesel fuel in the Arctic
• Economy: What is behind Russia's oil strategy and why has it broken the deck?

They say that the name of Siberia comes from Sibi Ir, which in Tatar means Sleeping Earth . Climate change is there awakening the region to a new reality where roads blur and buildings shorten their useful lives. Also fuel tanks, generating spills like the one that occurred a week ago in the Ambarnaya river, near the Arctic. That northern region is fragile, but rich in resources. Mining, gas, and oil farms are numerous, but security controls are not always up to scratch.

On May 29, when one of the diesel tanks of the NTEK thermal power plant (a subsidiary of the mining giant Norilsk Nickel) collapsed, causing the leakage of more than 20,000 tons of hydrocarbons , Alexey Knizhnikov was startled with conflicting news on the other end of the phone. A spill specialist at the WWF environmental agency, he first heard that a car had crashed into the tank. Then it caught fire as it passed over the spilled fuel, but there was no damage to the natural environment. Until two days later he could not confirm the colossal spill. Now the authorities face the task of cleaning it.

The Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Dimitri Kobilkin, advocates recovering the greatest amount of fuel , processing it with the corresponding chemical reagents, and only when things become very difficult, burning a small part. Some less toxic components evaporate in six weeks, Knizhnikov points out, "but the most poisonous ones are already dissolved in the water and very dangerous." The environment could recover in 10 or 15 years: "If there are no new disasters, of course."

According to Norilsk Nickel, the reservoir was damaged when the pillars implanted in the permafrost that supported it began to sink. The accident could be attributed to the melting of this frozen surface, caused by climate change. High temperatures thaw too much of the perennial ice on which any building in the area sits .

Permafrost is mainly made up of mud and vegetation. In some parts of Siberia it penetrates almost a kilometer into the subsoil. This phenomenon has already weakened numerous structures in northern Russia, and the government has already identified it as one of the challenges of this decade.

"Permafrost is an additional problem, and Russia already has a lot of experience from the USSR: we build cities, pipelines, power plants ... there is a developed praxis and we know something about how to deal with this instability," explains Knizhnikov. For him, the accident is not only due to climate change, "but due to poor monitoring, because all those reserves that have fuel must be contained in something else, such as a kind of pool around the tank , so that in the event of a spill, it is not go far. "

The deposit that caused the disaster " is a huge construction, it is more than 30 years old and after so long it weakens, so our recommendation is to start new construction before reaching the age of 35." Instead of preventing, "no attention has been paid to these facilities."

Partly because that fuel is not such an important product: "They store it in case they need it due to a gas problem."

Last month was the warmest May ever recorded, according to the European service on climate change, Copernicus, which warns of temperatures far above normal, especially in the Arctic. In Siberia higher than usual temperatures were recorded, with almost 10ºC above normal .

A territory that is blurred

Although little news comes from there, climate change has long disturbed the activity of Siberians, They represent 28% of the population of Russia, despite occupying 75% of the territory : three inhabitants per square kilometer. Outside the cities, the Siberian grows up feeling small in an endless and difficult land. It deals with snow and ice, but also with mud and puddles, depending on the season. Changes in the temperature calendar cause some communication channels to expire earlier.

In many parts of Siberia, especially in the north, it is impossible to dig down to bedrock to build a road to use. Excavator expeditions shape the route each fall by separating the snow and freezing it faster and more intensively. This invention serves to connect regions like Yakutsk and Irkutsk.

The so-called winter highway , which links mining or hydrocarbon-linked towns, is melting ever before. In this way the transportation of the goods becomes more expensive , which in some cases cannot arrive on the indicated date. Some routes are already dangerous as of April 1, as they pass over rivers or lakes. Two decades ago they lasted one more month.

In the northwest of the region, ice breaking on the Obi and Yenisei rivers has never started so early. Spring has been a plague of fires: a surface comparable to Greece has burned . Then a cyclone and floods.

Further north, the change is even more noticeable. Last month, the maximum extent of the Arctic Ocean ice sheet was the second lowest since records began in the 1970s, according to The New York Times . This has opened up new possibilities for the transport of goods by the northern sea route. Suddenly Asia is very close. You can get from Norway to Korea in 19 days. The journey takes 30% less than through the Suez Canal.

Avoid a spill into the sea

The accident in the Ambarnaya River is considered by environmental organizations as the worst ecological accident produced by hydrocarbons in the region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, publicly scolded Vladimir Potanin, one of the country's richest men and head of the Norilsk Nickel group. The company is one of the most profitable in Russia, but it is often criticized for not having made a lot of investments in facilities that it inherited from the Soviet Union. " The spills are constantly happening ," denounces Ruslan Abdullaev, leader of the local collective Norilsk mi Hogar.

Putin himself reproached last week those responsible for the company for not having changed the collapsed tank in time. "This river has been polluted several times by the same company," confirms Knizhnikov, "and so the wildlife is already in poor condition."

The Russian government has ordered the overhaul of its more fragile infrastructure built on permafrost. At the same time, he reported that he had managed to stop the advance of those more than 20,000 tons of hydrocarbons spilled in the Arctic river. "The consequences could have been worse, but the response came very quickly and they cut the river before it reached Lake Piasino," explains Knizhnikov.

Some inspectors told Russian media yesterday that the fuel is surely already in the lake. It could thus extend over the entire surface, where it would occupy only a millimeter in height due to the absence of the effect of the current, thus ending the exchange of oxygen. The waters of Lake Piasino then flow through the river of the same name, very important for Siberia, to the Kara Sea. Throughout this immense region, pollution has been a problem since Soviet times .

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