TASS
October 21, 2010
The environmental protection prosecutor’s office in the Baikal region
achieved that the measures will be taken to stop the contamination of
the Umykej lakes with toxic wastewaters from the Priargunsk mining and
chemical plant.
[Source]
The Krasnokamensk city court satisfied a lawsuit, which the Chita district prosecutor in charge of environmental protection filed against one of the largest uranium producing plants in Russia and in the world.
The court ruled that the Priargunsk mining and chemical plant should
build additional toxic waste treatment facilities and wastewater
decontamination installations before 2013, the press service of the
prosecutor’s office in the Baikal region told Itar-Tass on Thursday.
The plant is to install special collecting headers and to repair the
mechanical toxic wastewater treatment system within 20 months.
The Umykej lake system was provided lawfully for the Priargunsk mining
and chemical plant to dispose of the waste and drainage waters three
years ago until the end of 2012, but the equipment of the wastewater
treatment facilities is out of order, senior assistant prosecutor for
public relations in the Baikal region Anatoly Uskov said.
“The wastewater treatment facilities can treat no more than 24,000 cubic
meters of wastewaters daily, but 39,000 cubic meters really pass
through them. The excessive wastewaters are spilled into the lakes
after the mechanical water treatment. Meanwhile, wastewater treatment
facilities do not decontaminate the wastewaters, there are some
problems with their mechanical treatment and the biological wastewater
treatment system is unstable,” Uskov noted.
As a result the content of zinc, phosphate, phenol, oil products,
iron, magnesium, sulphates, nitrates and several other dangerous
admixtures exceeds the permissible standards. The swimming and fishing
are forbidden in the lakes long ago due to the accumulation of
dangerous chemical substances.
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