Russian Rosatom to help Armenia eliminate chemical waste at Nairit plant
YEREVAN, March 28. /ARKA/. Rosatom (Russian State Atomiс Energy Corporation) is working out a project for eliminating chemical waste at Nairit enterprise in Yerevan, once one of the largest producers of synthetic rubber, Rosatom official Andrei Lebedev told TASS on Friday.
He said at the beginning of 2023, representatives of Rosatom's subsidiaries Federal Environmental Operator and Rusatom Greenway JSC visited the Nairit plant in Yerevan and the Vanadzor-Khimprom plant in Armenia's third-largest town of Vanadzor to collect initial information.
'Upon joint consultations with the Armenian party a decision was made to examine Nairit plant in detail as an object rendering negative environmental impact on the residents of Yerevan," Lebedev said.
According to him, currently, Russian and Armenian specialists are actively exploring the most significant sources of environmental risks and key priority steps aimed at elimination of accumulated damage at Nairit.
"Our colleagues from Armenia addressed us with a proposal to consider taking part in liquidation of accumulated environmental damage in the territories of former production facilities of Nairit and Vanadzor-Khimprom plants. Considering the single approach to design of chemical production facilities in the former Soviet Union, they are in many ways similar to the facilities located on the territory of Russia. This allows projecting the solutions applied by our specialists to liquidate accumulated ecological damage to the facilities located on the territory of the Republic of Armenia," Lebedev concluded.
One of the flagships of the chemical industry of the USSR, Nairit was in soviet times a monopolist in synthetic rubber production. In 1989, under pressure from the environmental movement, Nairit was shut down and fell into decay; a few years later the government of the already independent Armenia decided to re-launch it, but the markets were already lost.
Over the past decades the enterprise had changed hands and accumulated huge debts; from 2010 it began to stand idle and bankruptcy proceedings were initiated. Nairit was declared bankrupt by a court in Yerevan in 2016 because of its failure to pay electricity bills totaling 1.24 billion drams. --0--
