Secret projects of radioactive garbage plants

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Solving the garbage problem by building waste incineration plants around Moscow may not solve the problem, but only aggravate it due to waste management technology, which can worsen the environmental safety of the region …

As it became known to Constantinople, investors and developers of waste incineration plants for the Moscow region did not abandon the idea of building up the region with giant waste disposal ovens. This was mentioned at one of the recent meetings of the project developers - RT-Invest company with experts in Moscow

The meeting once again discussed the risks of operating the first four waste incineration plants (incineration plants) - in Noginsk, Voskresensk, Naro-Fominsk and Solnechnogorsk districts. The locations of the remaining enterprises have not yet been announced to the public. But it is obvious that none of the residents of the region is immune from the appearance of a huge garbage oven in their "backyard" in the coming years.

I quickly understand the intention of the regional administration to solve the waste problem. But perhaps the most dangerous and ineffective way to do it has been chosen. 15 waste incineration plants around Moscow, which the investor of the projects "RT-Invest" plans to build, can only aggravate the situation. Experts, attracted by the All-Russian Popular Front (ONF), came to the conclusion that both the project itself and the waste management technology that it contains must be revised for a number of reasons related to issues of both environmental safety and economic efficiency of factories.,

- explained to Constantinople Anton Khlynov, Chairman of the Commission on Environmental Safety of the Moscow Regional Branch of the Russian Geographical Society.

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According to the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources Management of the region, more than 10 million tons of waste are produced in the Moscow region annually. Back in 2015, the incineration lobbyists asked President Putin to allocate funds from the federal budget for the construction of 15 incineration plants with a capacity of up to 700 thousand tons of waste per year. However, money from the national project "Clean Country" was received only for four such plants.

According to Khlynov, public organizations have long been in dialogue with the developers of plant projects and with the authors of the "Clean Country" project from the state corporation "Rostec". For example, now the regional branch of the ONF in the Moscow region is preparing an appeal to the investor of the incineration plant, RT-Invest, with a list of questions for a broad public discussion of projects of waste incineration plants. And there are reasons for this: until now, not a single independent public organization intending to conduct a public environmental examination of the incineration plant in the Moscow region has received the entire set of project documents, despite the fact that there is even an April decision of the Supreme Court, in particular, on the plant near Voskresensk …

In Naro-Fominsk, AGK-1 (part of RT-Invest) referred to a trade secret, refusing the public to obtain project documentation. But here, too, the developers were put in their place in the Arbitration Court of the Moscow Region at the suit of the Principle society.

On July 12, the court confirmed that the project documentation cannot be an object of commercial secrets, as indicated by paragraph 4 of Article 5 of the Federal Law No. 98-FZ of July 29, 2004 “On Commercial Secrets”. Such a regime cannot be established by persons engaged in entrepreneurial activities in relation to information about environmental pollution, sanitary-epidemiological and radiation conditions and other factors that have a negative impact on ensuring the safe operation of production facilities, the safety of every citizen and the safety of the population as a whole,

- Nadezhda Efimova, an activist from Mogutovo, a village located one kilometer from the future plant, told Tsargrad.

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“The documentation for all incinerators in the Moscow region is kept secret, even despite the court decisions in our favor. We insist that a public environmental review of all incinerator projects should be carried out. Residents of the region will put themselves and their children at risk by no means hypothetically, and we are not even allowed to get acquainted with the data on which our health directly depends,”says Anna Dmitrieva, co-coordinator of the Ecologika movement.

Bad statistics

Recently, a Russian translation of a 2012 study by Spanish scientists from Environment International magazine was published on social media. Experts have come to the conclusion that emissions from incineration plants in their country lead to an increase in cancer among residents of neighboring areas. The study report states:

Excess cancer mortality (BYM model: 95 percent relative risk) has been found in populations living in the immediate vicinity of these facilities in general (and mainly around incinerators) and, in particular, around scrap metal recycling facilities and old vehicles. … Of particular note are the results for tumors of the pleura, stomach, liver, kidneys, ovaries, lungs, leukemia, tumors of the rectum and bladder. Emissions of toxic substances - dioxins - play an important role in the deterioration of cancer statistics.

In the spring of this year, the publication of a translation of the scientific work of an international group of experts on the Dutch incineration plant, launched in 2011 and using the latest technology, caused a great resonance. It was the dioxins that were carefully measured when studying the impact of this plant on the environment and human health.

It turned out that grass on pastures near the plant contains almost twice as much dioxins as allowed by the "norms" - 1.2 pg TEQ / g at a rate of 0.75 pg TEQ / g. Chicken eggs in neighboring farms also turned out to be poisoned with dioxins. And in general, these poisons were detected there in 2-4 times more than in grass and eggs in areas remote from the plant.

Scientists are sure that the source of poisoning of grass and eggs was precisely the emissions from the incineration plant: "The content of dioxin congeners in flue gas samples taken by the long-term method is similar in value to the content of dioxin congeners in eggs of domestic chickens and phytomass samples of herbaceous plants," the report says. research.

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Supporters of the plants assure that the new technologies that will be used at the Moscow Region Incinerators are modern, and therefore there are no risks from their use. A combustion temperature of more than 1200 degrees will avoid the release of dioxins, which cannot be formed in such a heat. But even here the specialists have a lot of buts.

The main problem of any incinerators, and this has been proven by research on a Dutch plant, is the need to restart them. Experts note that household waste is not homogeneous, and in order to adjust the systems to the composition of the waste, the incineration process must be stopped and started again. At this moment, hazardous substances are released, and their amount can be significantly exceeded. It will not be possible to find out about the outlier in real time. This, according to experts, requires at least a day of analysis in a stationary laboratory, and not in the field.

Garbage PR

Why, after all, is Russia still managing to promote factories that, as you know, Europe is rejecting? There are several reasons for this.

First, supporters of the IGC say that Europe is not abandoning them at all, despite the corresponding communiqué of the European Commission in 2017.

Indeed, in some countries of the European Union the situation has developed in such a way that it is now very difficult to abandon burning. Plants have been built, landfills (not foul-smelling dumps like Kuchino or Timokhovo, but high-tech facilities) are almost completely decommissioned, and there are no other ways to destroy waste that cannot be recycled.

Moreover, in the same Germany, more than 60% of household waste becomes recyclable. And the so-called tailings are sent for incineration.

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This is the second loud slogan of our supporters of incineration. They say that the tailings are sent to the oven, and the rest is for processing. But the reality is that in Russia, separate collection at the housing and communal services level remains at an almost primitive level due to ill-conceived logistics and low interest from operators.

The plant developers say they will do the sorting themselves. Constantinople attended the events where representatives of RT-Invest spoke about it. However, from the conclusion of the independent environmental review of the incineration plant projects, carried out under the auspices of the ONF, published this spring, it is known that there are no indicators on sorting in the plant design.

And of course, the incineration lobbyists are exploiting the thesis that the people are tired of landfills. Everywhere people are dissatisfied and protest. But does this mean that it is the incineration of all waste that should be the alternative?

Tsargrad managed to find out that in the near future, other waste management technologies that cannot yet be recycled may be presented to the public. And no one canceled initiatives to reduce production and consumption, for example, disposable non-medical plastics and returnable containers.