Norilsk Nickel

https://www.nytimes.com/

Residents of Norilsk long felt isolated from their country’s turbulence. Then a mining company strung a fiber-optic cable across 600 miles of tundra.

NORILSK, Russia — On a screen, the California sun beams through the palm fronds and the Walk of Fame gleams underfoot. This island of mines and smokestacks in the tundra has high-speed internet now, so Andrei Kurchukov watches videos about America.

Videos by one of his favorite YouTube personalities, Marina Mogilko, feature interviews with fellow Russian expatriates in the United States. “Los Angeles,” she tells her one million followers, is “where Russian dreams come true.” “I watch her and think, alas,” Mr. Kurchukov said. “So what we’re showing about the rotting West is false.”

Closed to foreigners, unreachable by road and shrouded in darkness for 45 days a year, Norilsk, an Arctic nickel-mining hub of 180,000, is Russia’s most isolated major city. Lacking reliable digital communication with the rest of the country — “the continent,” they call it — residents used to fly home with external hard drives full of downloaded books and movies after their trips out.

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https://tass.com/

KRASNOYARSK, June 27. /TASS/. About 7,000 families have been moved since 2011 from the Norilsk Industrial District (the Krasnoyarsk Region’s north) to regions with better climate conditions, Nornickel’s Vice President Dmitry Pristanskov said on Wednesday at presentation of the company’s report on sustainable development.

In 2011, Russia’s Ministry of Regional Development, the Krasnoyarsk Region, the city of Norilsk and the Norilsk Nickel Company (Nornickel) signed an agreement to support families, who wanted to move out from Norilsk and Dudinka (the Taimyr Municipal District’s center).

People, who have worked in the Extreme North for more than 15 years could participate in the program. The most preferred destinations have been the Krasnoyarsk, Moscow, Leningrad and Krasnodar Regions.

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http://mentalfloss.com/

In much of the Northern Hemisphere right now, it’s getting colder and darker and the winter blues are setting in. But few places get it quite as bad as Norilsk, Russia, where residents won’t see a sunrise until mid-January. Worse yet, it’s arguably the coldest city in the world.

One of two Siberian cities built in the continuous permafrost zone, during the winter, the city of more than 175,000 people can see cold snaps as brutally low as -78°F. Overall, Norilsk boasts a yearlong average temperature of just 14°F. (Some will argue that the Siberian city of Yakutsk is colder, but that depends on how you want to slice it: Yakutsk is indisputably chillier in the winter—an average temperature of -42°F in January!—but it has much hotter summers and so, when measured by its yearly average, is warmer overall.)

Then there’s the snow. Norilsk “is covered with snow for about 270 days a year,” Vincze Miklós writes for io9, “and the inhabitants must deal with snowstorms one day out of every three.”

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http://bellona.org/

Dangerous emissions from the Kola Mining and Metallurgy Company dropped by nearly 9 percent during 2017, says data from the company, marking, according to its figures, a significant drop in pollution over the previous year.

The data were published in the annual report of Norilsk Nickel, the Kola enterprise’s Siberia-based parent company and one of the world’s largest nickel producers, which has long been a focus of environmental ire.

Last year’s drop in sulfur dioxide will come as welcome news to the Murmansk Region and neighboring Scandinavia, which have long suffered pollution from the nickel refining works –– as well as decades of broken promises to bring it to heel.

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