MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti economic commentator Vlad Grinkevich) - The accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydroelectric Power Plant is one of the biggest man-made disasters in modern Russia. It has exceeded the Chernobyl catastrophe in the amount of the simultaneously released energy and the scale of destruction.
Its causes are yet to be revealed, but such a major disaster at an important facility has already raised a new wave of allegations about the physical depreciation of the Russian infrastructure, and the ensuing threat of a series of technological catastrophes.
A number of respectable British and American media have discussed the disaster with prominent experts. Their conclusion is as follows: The service life of the Soviet-made infrastructure has expired, and is going to start tumbling down. The accident at the power plant is just a prelude to a whole series of other man-made disasters.
The Russian leaders had a sensitive reaction to this. President Dmitry Medvedev called these statements about Russia's technological collapse "absurd": "This gloating comes from those who do not like Russia in its current borders and its role in the world arena."
Foreign experts have predicted horrible industrial disasters in Russia since the mid-1990s but, fortunately, these apocalyptic forecasts have not come true. These predictions reached another peak on the threshold of the 21st century. Experts and journalists again alleged that the Soviet-built technological facilities had exhausted their potential, and that a series of technological disasters would befall Russia starting in 2003-2005. They even coined a special term, "the 2003 problem," but their predictions did not materialize this time, either.
Does this mean that the problem of the infrastructure's depreciation does not exist? Or that the problem exists but its scale has been greatly exaggerated? Most probably, these Western experts underrated the quality of Soviet technology.
In the early 2000s, a group of researchers from the Mstislav Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics published an article, in which they validated their conclusions about potential disasters in Russia with mathematical analysis. The very first line of their report sounded alarming: "Russia has entered the phase of a systemic crisis, where negative economic, social, and technological trends of the last 15 years are starting to produce new types of catastrophes, calamities, and instabilities."
The researchers emphasized that the infrastructure was in an extremely dangerous condition: the technological fleet of practically all industries, dams, pipelines, roads, high transmission lines, and housing and utilities (where wear and tear exceeded 75%) cannot ensure a stable and safe functioning of the domestic economy, not to mention its development. The adjective "systemic" as applied to the crisis meant that it could not be overcome with single measures in some specific fields.
Russian officials admit that the infrastructure is in a deplorable state. Head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Environment, Technology and Nuclear Management (Rostekhnadzor) Nikolai Kutyin said that practically nothing had been done to modernize it in 20 years, from the mid-1980s to the end of 2005. Starting in 2006, things got moving, and the scale of reconstruction and capital repairs reached fantastic proportions.
"We were supervising 11,000 facilities undergoing capital repairs simultaneously, but with the economic downturn this figure dived to 3,500. That is somewhat scary," Kutyin said. However, he is confident that if the Russian economy overcomes the financial crisis in the near future, the number of technical and infrastructure installations subject to modernization will start growing next year.
However, modernization has different meanings. Scientists have emphasized with good reason that the crisis is systemic, which means that the country has to upgrade all of its technological sphere, rather than individual facilities, to say nothing of their fragments. Otherwise, the efforts to modernize facilities may cause more accidents.
Take, for instance, the explosion at the Ulyanovskaya mine in 2007. Kutyin said that having conducted an inquiry into this accident, Rostekhnadzor came to the conclusion that it had been caused by accelerated modernization: The old mine and the new highly-productive equipment turned out to be incompatible. The Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydroelectric Power Plant was also undergoing modernization but its new automatic system failed.
The disaster in Khakassia was a signal for the Russian authorities. They should urgently take care of the condition of major technical facilities. Giving a rough response to the criticism of the domestic infrastructure by the foreign media, even President Medvedev acknowledged that the country "is seriously lagging behind in the technological sphere," whereas the infrastructure is often ineffective and requires immediate modernization.
But will the state and business have enough political will and funds for a comprehensive reform of the technological sphere? About 40 billion rubles will have to be spent to eliminate the consequences of the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydroelectric Power Plant alone, and the whole process will take about four years.
However, if a comprehensive solution is not found, Russia will be caught in a vicious circle - it will have to spend increasing amounts of money on disaster relief; this will deprive it of the resources for modernizing the infrastructure, which, in turn, will cause more catastrophes.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
