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Who will pay the repairs of Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro-electric power station?

Sergei Mitrokhin’s blog at the Echo Moskvi radio station web-site
August 18, 2009

All the technogenic disasters in all the countries have some common roots (natural calamities, human factor, etc), however, Russia’s disasters have some specific traits rooted in our policies.


This refers to abrupt and ill-conceived commercialisation of the spheres that had to be governed with professionalism and rational conservatism. Thus, for example, there was not a single professional power engineer in the RAO Unified Energy System of Russia board since 2002, the board had only specialists in financial flows.


By the way, the Ministry of Atomic Energy (Rosatom) demonstrates the same picture. This was further aggravated by abolishing of the old standards (GOSTs) and replacing them by new technical regulations which has been still going on. This means that a huge bulk of technological safety requirements was simply abolished and nothing came to replace it for a long time. One of the arguments was that it was allegedly unprofitable to spend money on tiring preventive measures and routine maintenance – it was compared with a slipknot on the energetic and dynamic business.


This led to mass-scale violations of safety measures and, in particular, to explosions at the Kuzbass mines, to speak nothing of a frantic electrical energy sector reform YABLOKO has been opposing from the very beginning.


This reform boosted commercialisation rates by many times in this strategic industrial sector. Now it is over, the stock is distributed and rests in someone’s pockets, however, we still do not see investments into development. And it is obviously the federal budget, rather than progressive honest investors who bought the shares for a trifling sum, will cover the repairs at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro electric power station.


So, where is the money, Anatoli Chubais [the ex-head of RAO]? This gigantic fraud of the 20th century is prone of more disasters for us. I shall say nothing about its atomic component. As I dread even to think about what may happen.

See also:
Energy Sector Reform

Sergei Mitrokhin's blog at Echo Moskvi web-site



August 18, 2009