Town Stalls RusHydro?€™s $20Bln Dam

TURA, Krasnoyarsk Region — RusHydro, the state electricity firm reeling after a deadly dam disaster last month, suffered a new blow Tuesday when an ambitious plan to construct a new giant hydropower plant on the Lower Tunguska River stalled amid public protests.

After listening to RusHydro officials present their plans for the Evenkia dam and answer questions for five hours, residents of the town of Tura took the unprecedented step of declaring the public hearing null, citing incomprehensive materials that pointed to lack of research by RusHydro and inadequate evidence of the project’s safety for the environment.

Local officials said Tuesday that they would not sign the procedural documents that are necessary for the dam’s approval following the public uproar.

Tura is located in the part of the Krasnoyarsk region that would be most affected by flooding from the $20 billion Evenkia dam, which with a planned capacity of 12 gigawatts would be the third most powerful hydropower plant in the world.

RusHydro lost its biggest hydropower plant, Sayano-Shushenskaya, after an accident on Aug. 17 killed 75 people. The repair bill is expected to easily top $1 billion, but Energy Minister Nikolai Shmatko, who chairs RusHydro’s board, said last week that the government was still pressing ahead with the Evenkia plant. He conceded, however, that it was unlikely a final decision on the construction of the Evenkia plant would be made until after next year.

RusHydro announced its desire to build the dam two years ago. The government sees the Evenkia dam as a strategic reserve that would cover an electricity deficit and stimulate development in Siberia and “zones of Russia’s Arctic interests,” according to RusHydro’s web site. The government has included the completed dam in its 2020 plan of Russia’s power generators.

Holding public hearings is a required step for the environmental impact assessment of a proposed project. As part of the process, a protocol from the hearings should be signed by the company, the head of the local government, and members of the local community. A month after completing public hearings, the company can make changes to the project documentation before sending it, along with the protocol from the hearings, for government evaluation at the Regional Development Ministry.

The protocol was given to the local Tura administration on Monday, said Mikhail Bychko, head of the project department in RusHydro’s Siberia division. It has been signed by three people from the company, but four more signatures are needed from the Tura administration and community representatives. “We expect the document to be signed within a week,” Bychko said.

Tura Mayor Igor Mukto said Tuesday that he had received the protocol but “has no plans to sign it.” Instead, a council of Tura deputies will convene within a week to issue a decree regarding the decision of the public hearing, held Friday. “The people have spoken. They don’t recognize the hearings,” Mukto said.

Bychko could not say what RusHydro would do if the protocol fails to receive the needed signatures from Tura. “This is the first time in our practice,” he said.

“Without the protocol, the company does not have all the documents necessary for the government evaluation. Therefore, it cannot further develop the project,” said Mikhail Kreindlin, an expert with Greenpeace Russia who attended the hearings.

A poll conducted during the hearings showed that 94.6 percent of Tura residents are against construction of the dam. Only four out of 221 people present at the hearings said they wanted the hydropower plant built.

Crammed into the local public hall, people listened to representatives of RusHydro and their contractors present the project and answer their questions for hours. The dam that RusHydro considers “optimal” would raise the water level to 200 meters above sea level, creating a long irregularly shaped reservoir with a surface area of nearly a million hectares. Most of Tura and five smaller villages along the river would be flooded, as would the pastures and hunting grounds in the valley. A total of 5,000 people would have to relocate, according to project documentation.

The remote villages on the Lower Tunguska River are removed from transportation infrastructure and accessible only by air. About 5,000 people live in Tura, the largest of the villages.

The Evenkia district’s budget is almost entirely subsidized by the Krasnoyarsk region. Fuel, construction materials, and most consumer products are shipped to Tura once a year when the water is high in the spring.

The dam would cut off the single-river transportation route.

“Once they construct a dam, gasoline will cost about 120 rubles ($4) per liter. Who is going to buy it?” said one Tura resident at the hearing.

Area residents, most of whom subsidize their incomes by hunting and fishing, called the dam an “environmental bomb” that would cut off supply of valuable fish, displace animals from their natural environment in the valley, and increase health risks by raising humidity.

“As soon as the protocol from the hearings is signed, the company will forget about us,” said Viktor Bilanin, who works on issues concerning indigenous people in the Evenkia district administration. “By law the company has to provide complete and authentic information in their environmental assessment documents, which they haven’t done.”

Pyotr Suvorov, head of the Evenkia district, complained that RusHydro officials had sent his office a list of research documents that they had consulted — all of them completed in the 1970s. “RusHydro should do field research in earnest to determine the impact of the dam and then come back to present their project,” he said.

A giant dam on the Lower Tunguska was considered in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, but a study completed by Siberian Academy of Scientists concluded in 1988 that raising the reservoir level to the 200-meter mark would be unacceptable.