A gigantic Soviet-era long-term construction project is being demolished in Crimea
The Crimean government has decided to demolish an unfinished nuclear power plant near the town of Shchelkino in the east of the peninsula.
The corresponding decision was published on the website of the Council of Ministers of the Republic, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The facility, whose stage of completion was estimated at 80%, must be dismantled by the end of this year.
“To write off by dismantling real estate that is state property of the Republic of Crimea, assigned to the State Unitary Enterprise of the Republic of Crimea “Center for Integrated Supply of Construction Projects”, located at the address: Republic of Crimea, Leninsky district, Shchelkino,” says in the text of the order.
Federation Council Senator from the Republic of Crimea Sergei Tsekov believes that the government did the right thing by deciding to demolish the power plant. In his opinion, tourism infrastructure can be built on this site.
“This is the right decision; there are no options for completing the construction of the nuclear power plant and there have not been since the early 90s. Even at that time, it was possible to try to repurpose it for another energy, but in the end everything fell into decay and was destroyed until today. In the end, we need to spend money, demolish this building and, perhaps, build new ones in place of these buildings. In particular, that region can successfully develop as a region of sanatorium and resort recreation; I think that space will be freed up for new buildings,” Tsekov said.
Crimean political scientist Sergei Kiselev, one of those who supported the construction of the station in the late 1980s, believes that the government is wasting budget money, and dismantling the unfinished building will only pollute the territory.
“What is this building? This is simply a monument to the era of socialism, construction. It consists of a huge amount of concrete and other building materials and occupies a large area. But I have not heard an explanation about why it is being demolished, why such a need arose, where these materials will be transported. Now all this is compact, but otherwise we will have thousands of cubic meters of garbage that needs to be disposed of somewhere.
What it will be used for - for the production of crushed stone for road construction or for something else, I don’t know. It is very difficult for me to judge why the need for demolition suddenly arose right now, at this time. And this is a big problem, because we receive information about some actions, but why they are happening and why they are happening at this particular time, this information is not available,” Kiselev said.
He also emphasized that the refusal to complete the nuclear power plant harmed Crimea, which could have received a good trump card in favor of independence from Ukraine if the project had been implemented.
“In Soviet times, I was one of the few people who supported the construction of a nuclear power plant, I moderated the first discussions on the problem of its closure, and received a huge amount of negativity from environmental activists. But if we had built this power plant then, if it had been launched, then Crimea would have had a surplus of electricity 30 years ago.
And this means that not only our production would be provided with electricity, which would reduce the cost and make it competitive. But then and now I viewed this power plant as the source of our independence from Ukraine. Then we would have had much more arguments in our time in the political dispute with Kiev. But they followed the path of the populists, and now Russia had to invest huge amounts of money to provide energy to Crimea,” the expert noted.
Let us remember that the construction of a nuclear power plant near Shchelkino began back in 1975. The facility was planned to be commissioned in 1989, but after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the collapse of the USSR, its implementation was abandoned. At the same time, the readiness of the first power unit at that time was 80%, and the second - 18%.
The unfinished nuclear power plant became widespread as an art object - from 1995 to 1999, the popular music festival “Republic of KaZantip” was held here, the famous film by Russian director Fyodor Bondarchuk “Inhabited Island”, and other films and videos were filmed here.
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