Pure waters of Lake Baikal in danger from 6.5 million tons of toxic waste

The risk that the world’s biggest storage of clear water can be forever poisoned by chlorine and lignin slurry is not just real but high, warn Russian and British experts. 

Lake Baikal’s ecosystem is under threat from massive storage of chemical waste left on its south bank after the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill was closed in 2013. 

Nearly 6.5 million tons of poisonous solid and liquid waste were accumulated during 50 years of the mill’s operation.

After President Vladimir Putin ordered the plant to be shut the waste was left next to pristine waters of the world’s deepest and oldest lake, containing 20% of the planet’s unfrozen freshwater. 

The waste is kept inside at least 13 large quarries, or ponds, built in three clusters next to each other and in close proximity to the lake’s shore. 

Three large waste ponds can be seen on the Google Maps images below. Three more are situated to the east, and the rest are visible in a staircase up the hillside.

Pictures of the waste storages by the Google maps

The ponds were supposed to be a temporary solution when they were built - as packs of cards one above the other - in a mudflow hazard area, in fact, right on the way of a potential mud slide. 

Even if to exclude the mudflow threat, the danger of flooding was always high, and a near-critical situation almost happened in 1971, when water went close to 5 metres above the norm mark.

As some Russian experts say, it was pure luck that recent incessant rains that flooded Irkutsk region and destroyed hundreds of homes did not overflow the toxic waste ponds. 

There was real concern that this could happen. 

Academic Dave Petley from the University of Sheffield in the UK slammed the arrangement as a 'horrifying example of a high risk waste storage facility’. 

‘The risks at this waste storage site are clearly unacceptably high, and the consequences of a major failure into Lake Baikal at Baikalsk would be truly catastrophic. And it is worth noting that these are not the only waste storage ponds in this area’, said the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation on his blog, calling for an immediate assessment of the ponds' integtrity. 

Checks made at the end of July showed no sign of leaks or threats to integrity of the waste pounds, Irkutsk Ministry of emergency said. 

Yet experts insist time has come to seek different solution to toxic waste problem. 

The disused plant is a bomb ready to explode, and the countdown has already started, said Yevgeny Simonov, Russian co-ordinator of Rivers Without Borders. 

Even if to exclude the mudflow threat, the danger of flooding was always high, and a near-critical situation almost happened in 1971, when water went close to 5 metres above the norm mark. Pictures from the 1971 flood, and of the waste ponds from mid-1970s

Several years ago state budget money was allocated to JSC Rusgeology which was assigned with a task to find a solution to the waste problem. 

In March this year several Russian newspapers reported that a new project for liquidating the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill waste should be ready by September 2019.