Norilsk

Norilsk is a city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located above the Arctic Circle, east of the Yenisey River and south of the western Taymyr Peninsula. It has a permanent population of 175,000. With temporary inhabitants included, its population reaches 220,000.

It is the world's northernmost city with more than 100,000 inhabitants and the second-largest city (after Murmansk) inside the Arctic Circle. Norilsk and Yakutsk are the only large cities in the continuous permafrost zone.

The nickel deposits of Norilsk-Talnakh are the largest-known nickel-copper-palladium deposits in the world. The smelting of the nickel ore is directly responsible for severe pollution, which generally comes in the form of acid rain and smog. By some estimates, one percent of global sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions come from Norilsk's nickel mines.

Name

Norilsk owes its name to its geographical location: the Norilsk river flows near the city (Norilka, Pyasino river basin), the city itslf is located near the Norilsk mountains. Travelers Khariton Laptev, Alexander Fyodorovich Middendorf, and Fedor Bogdanovich Schmidt mention the river Norilsk and Norilsk mountains in their reports. The Norilskaya River got its former name, Norilka, probably at the time when Taymyr was inhabited by Russian fishing people in the 16th–17th centuries during the existence of the city Mangazeya. Probably, the name of the river comes from the word "norilo", a long thin pole, which stretched the string of set nets under the ice from hole to hole. According to another version, the name of the river (Norilka) and, accordingly, the city comes from the Evenk word "narus" or Yukagir language "nioril", which means "swamps". It is also possible from the name of the Evenk tribe "Nyurilians"

History

Norilsk was founded at the end of the 1920s, but the official date of founding is traditionally 1935, when Norilsk was expanded as a settlement for the Norilsk mining-metallurgic complex and became the center of the Norillag system of Gulag labor camps. It was granted urban-type settlement status in 1939 and town status in 1953.

Norilsk is located between the West Siberian Plain and Central Siberian Plateau at the foot of the 1,700-meter-high (5,600 ft) Putoran Mountains, on some of the largest nickel deposits on Earth. Consequently, mining and smelting ore are the major industries. Norilsk is the center of a region where nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, palladium, and coal are mined. Mineral deposits in the Siberian Craton had been known for two centuries before Norilsk was founded, but mining began only in 1939, when the buried portions of the Norilsk-Talnakh intrusions were found beneath mountainous terrain.

Talnakh is the major mine/enrichment site now from where an enriched ore emulsion is pumped to Norilsk metallurgy plants.

To support the new city, the Norilsk railway to the port of Dudinka on the Yenisei River was established, first as a narrow-gauge line (winter 1935–36), later as 1,520 mm (4 ft 11+27⁄32 in) Russian standard gauge line (completed in the early 1950s). From Dudinka, enriched nickel and copper are transported to Murmansk by sea and, then, to the Monchegorsk enrichment and smelting plant on the Kola Peninsula, while more precious content goes up the river to Krasnoyarsk. This transportation takes place only during the summer. The port of Dudinka is closed and dismantled during spring's ice barrier floods of up to 20 meters (66 ft) in late May (a typical spring occurrence on all Siberian rivers).

In the early 1950s, the Salekhard–Igarka Railway was under construction from the European coal city Vorkuta via the Salekhard/Ob River, and Norilsk got a spacious railway station built in the expectation of train service to Moscow, but construction stopped after Joseph Stalin died.

According to the archives of Norillag, 16,806 prisoners died in Norilsk under the conditions of forced labor, starvation and intense cold during the existence of the camp (1935–1956).[14] Fatalities were especially high during World War II from 1942 to 1944 when food supplies were particularly scarce. Prisoners organized the non-violent Norilsk uprising in 1953. An unknown, yet significant number of prisoners continued to serve and die in the mines until around 1979.

A number of Finnish companies assisted in the construction and automation of Norilsk's No. 2 copper and nickel smelters (in the so-called Nadezhda complex), which led to bringing substantial numbers of Finnish metallurgical and automation experts and their families to Norilsk starting in 1978, creating a Finnish expat community of some hundreds of people for a couple of years. Norilsk before and after that has remained a closed city.

Norilsk-Talnakh continues to be a dangerous mine to work in. According to the mining company, there were 2.4 accidents per thousand workers in 2005. In 2017, Norilsk Nickel claimed that it had reduced its overall lost time injury frequency rate by almost 60%