The project of transferring part of the flow of the northern and Siberian rivers. Case of special humidity
One of the most ambitious Soviet projects is the transfer of Siberian rivers to the south. On October 23, 1984, the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU adopted this program. For the construction of the Asia Canal, they were going to take out 6.1 billion cubic meters of soil. The plans were destroyed by the extremely expensive cost of the project and the protests of scientists.
For the first time, the idea of transferring part of the flow of the rivers of Western Siberia to Central Asia was expressed in 1868 by the schoolboy Yakov Demchenko. He wrote the book "On the flooding of the Aral-Caspian lowland to improve the climate of the adjacent countries." Then public opinion qualified this idea as insane.
In the Soviet Union, the project began to be actively discussed from the 60s of the XX century, when the water consumption for irrigation in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan increased sharply. In 1970, the resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 612 "On the prospects for the development of land reclamation, regulation and redistribution of river flow in 1971-1985" was adopted. It declared the urgent need to transfer 25 cubic kilometers of water per year by 1985.
Asia Channel
The project was to create a huge system of canals and reservoirs from the confluence of the Irtysh and Ob with the possible transfer of part of the flow from the Yenisei basin to the Aral Sea. Along the way, water from the canal would flood not only the southern regions of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, but also the regions of Russia suffering from summer droughts - Kurgan, Chelyabinsk and Omsk with their developed grain farming.
Also, the canal could have a navigable value, linking the Siberian and Central Asian rivers, the Aral, Caspian Seas and the Northern Sea Route into a single transport system. The channel was going to be called Asia.
Its length would be about 2.5 thousand kilometers, width from 130 to 300 meters, depth - 15 meters. If Iran joined the project, it would be possible to connect this entire transport system to the Persian Gulf basin. A phased transfer of Siberian water was proposed: on the first - withdrawal of 25, on the second - 60, and in the long term - 75-100 cubic kilometers of water per year. How the Ob Sea works: the secrets of the reservoir
The developers considered more than 20 different options for the technical implementation of the transfer tasks. As a result of the analysis, options involving the creation of lowland reservoirs in areas with wetlands, as well as options with very long paths and expensive hydraulic structures for the transfer of runoff, were rejected.
The "Northern", the main, option involved the transfer of water from the Ob from Khanty-Mansiysk up to the mouth of the Irtysh, then further up the Tobol. From the upper reaches of the Tobol, water was transferred along the Turgai trough, which connects the West Siberian Plain with the Northern Aral Sea, into the bed of the drying Turgai River. Further, water would be carried through the Syr Darya basin, and the final point of the route was Urgench, on the Amu Darya. In the "southern" solution, they were going to dig a canal from the confluence of the Ob and Irtysh to the south, to the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers flowing into the Aral Sea.
The main technical problem was that the watershed of the Irtysh and Syrdarya basins stood in the way of the canal. It was necessary to drive water not only against the currents of the Ob, Irtysh and Tobol, but also to drive it uphill, to raise it to a height of 110 meters.
It was necessary to remove 6.1 billion cubic meters of soil (it was supposed to use nuclear explosions for excavation), lay 14.8 million cubic meters of reinforced concrete, mount 256 thousand tons of metal structures and equipment. It was planned to build 6 railway and 18 road bridges on this canal.
Criticism of environmentalists
The construction of only the first stage required investments, according to preliminary estimates of 15-16 billion dollars. Examination of the project in the State Planning Committee of the USSR in 1983 came to the conclusion that the amounts were underestimated by at least two times.
Also in the early 1980s, negative expert opinions were prepared by five departments of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A group of reputable academic scientists signed a letter prepared by an active opponent of the project, geologist Alexander Yanshin, to the Central Committee “On the catastrophic consequences of diverting part of the flow of northern rivers.” Baikal will dry up, cities will be washed away by a tsunami: what threatens Mongolian hydroelectric power plants
According to environmentalists, the implementation of the project could cause a number of adverse consequences: flooding of agricultural and forest lands by reservoirs, rising groundwater along the entire length of the canal with flooding of nearby settlements and highways.
There would be a death of valuable species of fish in the Ob River basin. They predicted an unpredictable change in the permafrost regime, climate change, changes in the ice cover in the Gulf of Ob and the Kara Sea, and much more.
As a result, on August 14, 1986, at a special meeting of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, it was decided to stop work on diverting part of the flow of the northern and Siberian rivers.
Project revival?
At the end of 2002, the "new" project of transferring the rivers of Siberia to Central Asia was unexpectedly proposed by the ex-mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. In his opinion, 6-7% of the waters of the Ob should be directed through a special channel from Khanty-Mansiysk to Kazakhstan and a number of Central Asian regions. Experts noted that the description of Luzhkov's project textually coincides with the transfer project, which was rejected in 1986.
Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Institute of Water Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences Viktor Danilov-Danilyan criticized Luzhkov's proposal. In his opinion, the cost of building such a canal will be about $200 billion, which will make the project unreasonably expensive.
The Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation Alexander Tkachev expressed a similar idea in May 2016. He stated that Russia could propose to China to discuss a project for the transfer of fresh water from the Altai Territory through Kazakhstan to one of the arid regions of China. At the same time, he added that the discussion is possible only if the interests of Russia are unconditionally observed, including from the point of view of ecology.
Prepared according to data from open sources
It's no secret that the natural world of the Earth was created with a fair amount of sadism: in some places there is a warm and long summer, millions of tons of corn and vegetables could be grown, but there is no water to irrigate the fields. In other places, water - at least fill up, but summer "one day and that I was at work" and nothing grows except cranberries with cloudberries. But since the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan “not to wait for favors from nature, but to take them is our task,” then, in full accordance with it, they decided to transform nature. The Karakum, Crimean and other irrigation canals built in the USSR should have faded before the real “project of the century” - the transfer of the waters of the Ob, Irtysh, and possibly the Yenisei to arid semi-deserts.
Scheme of the Siberian river diversion project, Kapitän Nemo, Captain Blood
The project of transferring part of the flow of the Ob and Irtysh to the Aral Sea basin had a long history - it was first put forward by the Ukrainian publicist Yakov Demchenko (1868-1871), in 1948 it was offered to Stalin by the famous Russian geographer Vladimir Obruchev, in the 1950s - by the Kazakh academician Shafik Chokin. But seriously, the matter "spun" only in the mid-1960s.
The confluence of the Irtysh and the Ob. From here the canal's route to Central Asia was supposed to begin, , 2016 Then the project was taken up by the Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Resources of the USSR and it consisted in creating a huge system of canals and reservoirs from the confluence of the Irtysh and Ob to the Aral Sea. Along the way, water from the canal would flood not only the southern regions of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, but also the regions of Russia suffering from summer droughts - Kurgan, Chelyabinsk and Omsk with their developed grain farming. Also, the canal could have a navigable value, linking the Siberian and Central Asian rivers, the Aral, Caspian Seas and the Northern Sea Route into a single transport system. The length of the main shipping channel (it was supposed to be called "Asia") was about 2550 km, width from 130 to 300 meters, depth - 15 meters. If Iran joined the project, it would be possible to connect this entire transport system to the Persian Gulf basin.
Turgai steppe of Kazakhstan. These arid regions were supposed to be watered by the canal from the Ob. , year 2012 The work was carried out by more than 160 organizations of the USSR, including 48 design and survey and 112 research institutes (including 32 institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences), 32 all-Union ministries and 9 ministries of the Union republics. 50 volumes of text materials, calculations and applied scientific research, 10 albums of maps and drawings were prepared. It was assumed that the cost of the entire project (taking into account the creation of new agricultural enterprises) would be 32.8 billion rubles, and it would pay off in just 6-7 years. In 1976, at the XXV Congress of the CPSU, it was decided to start work on the implementation of the project, the first work on the ground began, which lasted ten years.
They were stopped only after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, when, against the backdrop of a deepening crisis in the economy, the Soviet government realized that there was no more money for such expensive projects. However, environmental considerations also influenced the decision - if the Siberian rivers turned to the south, part of the territories in the north would inevitably be flooded, and in the south would suffer due to the rise of groundwater and the formation of salt marshes, unpredictable climatic changes could occur at a great distance from Caspian Sea to the Arctic Ocean. It can be noted for comparison that a similar "project of the century" also existed in America - to transfer part of the flow of the waters of the rivers of Alaska and Northwestern Canada to the south to water the dry regions of Canada, the USA and Mexico. It was actively developed in the 1950s, but then it was abandoned for approximately the same reasons as in the USSR: too expensive, unpredictable consequences for nature.
The Aral Sea region, here the canal path from the Ob was supposed to end, , 2013 However, 15 years after the consequences of the collapse of the USSR settled down, and the economies of the CIS countries again began to get on their feet, they again heard words about the need to return to the project of transferring the waters of Siberian rivers to Central Asia. New projects began to be lobbied by the presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as well as the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov.
Or would the canal go further, to the Caspian Sea, through the arid lands of Uzbek Khorezm and the dried-up channel of the Uzboy? , 2016 
Connecting with the Caspian Sea around here? alexey-mochalov, 2009 In May of this year, they also started talking about the possibility of transferring part of the waters of the Siberian rivers to the western regions of China. The head of the Ministry of Agriculture, Alexander Tkachev, then said: We are ready to offer a project for the transfer of fresh water from the Altai Territory of Russia through the Republic of Kazakhstan to the arid Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. In the near future, we will hold consultations with colleagues from Kazakhstan on this issue.».
When designing this idiocy back in the Soviet years, it was already clear that this was another feeder for the Ministry of Water Resources and its structures.
1. The problems of Kazakhstan and Central Asia in the field of water resources are not problems of water shortage, but problems of illiterate water use (irrigation rates exceeded by 2-3 times, discharges to the wrong place, losses up to 70%).
2. A very high cost of water - it will have to be driven uphill.
3.Consequences from the activities of the channel. The Great Karakum Canal in Turkmenistan caused a rise in groundwater, followed by soil salinization at a distance of up to 150 km. Considering that much larger volumes were planned and the canal ran along the Turgai trough, where the rocks are salty marine clays, then everything around will be a continuous solonchak.
Now in Kazakhstan there is no competent policy in the field of water resources. The Committee on Water Resources employs 34 people, of which 8 people are actually involved in water resources - they just physically do not have much time, they only solve the turnover.
There is not a single hydrologist among the staff of the Committee (my classmate has already left, and he was the last one there). The maximum there is land reclamators, the rest are generally lawyers and economists ...
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in the community:
The turn of the northern rivers, or rather, the transfer of part of the flow of Siberian rivers to Central Asia was needed to solve the problem of lack of fresh water in the southern regions of the country. In particular, it was stated that it was necessary to save the Caspian Sea from shallowing.
The main link in the project of turning the northern rivers to the south was the secret project "Taiga". Atomic workers were supposed to lay a canal between the northern rivers Pechora and Kolva with nuclear explosions. It was assumed that if the experiment was successful, many other channels would be laid in the USSR in this way. Atomic scientists were an influential force at that time, and they actually lobbied for this project. Thus, two tasks were solved: the creation of a channel and nuclear tests.
In order to dig a channel, it was supposed to make 250 explosions. At the same time, if the project were implemented, water contaminated with radiation would flow from Perm to Astrakhan, poisoning everything in its path...
It is interesting that the level of the Caspian began to rise sharply - by 32–40 cm per year - for objective reasons not related to human activity. It would seem that the need to turn the river back has disappeared. However, one of the largest environmental disasters of the 20th century broke out in the USSR. The Aral, the fourth largest lake in the world, begins to dry up. This was due to the fact that the waters of the rivers that fed it (the Amarya and Syrdarya) were actively used for watering cotton plantations.
In order to save the Aral and increase cotton production, the authorities decide to dig a canal... It will cut through the entire country - from Khanty-Mansiysk to the Aral itself. It will transport the waters of the Irtysh and the Ob to the dying lake. In addition, the waters of the Yenisei and Lena were going to be redirected to Central Asia.
However, experts noted that in order to drive water from Siberia to the Aral Sea (that is, from the bottom up), a huge amount of energy would be required and this project would bring more loss than profit. In addition, canals 200 meters wide will block the natural migration routes of animals... In all the rivers of Siberia, the number of fish will sharply decrease - this threatens small indigenous peoples with starvation. The swamps of Western Siberia will begin to dry up. Finally, these initiatives will lead to water shortages in Altai, Kuzbass, Novosibirsk and Omsk. This project was opposed by the intellectual and cultural elite of the country: a number of scientists, writers, etc.
Nevertheless, the authorities were determined to implement. The Ministry of Water Resources, without waiting for the project to be included in the five-year plan, purchased equipment with the allocated money and began work on turning the rivers ahead of schedule.
During this period, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. The economic situation begins to deteriorate, the country has debts never seen before. As a result, Gorbachev came to the conclusion that from now on the USSR could not afford such projects as river reversal. Then he decided to wrap up these initiatives under the environmental pretext. It could also bring political benefits: Gorbachev allowed public discussions on environmental issues, thus allowing a society that had accumulated irritation with the Soviet regime to let off some steam. On August 14, 1986, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU decided to postpone the project and limit itself to scientific research on this issue.
How rivers turned in the USSR
On May 24, 1970, the resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 612 "On the prospects for the development of land reclamation, regulation and redistribution of river flow in 1971-1985" was adopted. So began work on turning large rivers.
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Nuclear channels
The turn of the northern rivers, or rather, the transfer of part of the flow of Siberian rivers to Central Asia was needed to solve the problem of lack of fresh water in the southern regions of the country. In particular, it was stated that it was necessary to save the Caspian Sea from shallowing.
The main link in the project of turning the northern rivers to the south was the secret project "Taiga". Atomic workers were supposed to lay a canal between the northern rivers Pechora and Kolva with nuclear explosions. It was assumed that if the experiment was successful, many other channels would be laid in the USSR in this way. Atomic scientists were an influential force at that time, and they actually lobbied for this project. Thus, two tasks were solved: the creation of a channel and nuclear tests.
In order to dig a channel, it was supposed to make 250 explosions. At the same time, if the project had been implemented, water contaminated with radiation would have flowed from Perm to Astrakhan, poisoning everything in its path.
A few days before the explosion, commissioners begin to walk around the houses of nearby villages. They tried to warn and reassure the citizens. Residents were advised to go outside - this was done in case dilapidated houses start to collapse after a powerful explosion.
On March 23, 1971, an explosion occurred: a huge nuclear mushroom rose into the air. After the explosion within a radius of 500 km, the temperature jumped by almost 15 degrees. Heavy rains fell in many areas.
As it turned out, the experiment was not entirely successful, the charge power was not enough to dig the hole necessary for the channel. In this regard, the power had to be increased. A new batch of land mines is delivered to the taiga, the destructive power of which is several times greater than the first. However, the Kremlin unexpectedly wraps up the project. The leaders of the country realized that in the event of a series of powerful nuclear explosions, an international scandal cannot be avoided.
In the event that the Taiga project was fully implemented and 250 explosions were carried out, the ecology, and possibly the climate of the whole country, would change in the most radical way.
Currently, no one lives in the nuclear experiment zone. Frightened residents moved away from this place. A giant radioactive funnel was gradually flooded with water, a lake was formed. An unusually large fish appeared in this lake, which, according to experts, is the result of a mutation caused by radiation.
Save the Aral
Interestingly, after that, the level of the Caspian began to rise sharply - by 32-40 cm per year - for objective reasons not related to human activity. It would seem that the need to turn the river back has disappeared.
However, one of the largest environmental disasters of the 20th century broke out in the USSR. The Aral, the fourth largest lake in the world, begins to dry up. This was due to the fact that the waters of the rivers that fed it (Amu Darya and Syr Darya) were actively used for watering cotton plantations.
In order to save the Aral Sea and increase cotton production, the authorities decide to dig a canal 2,500 km long and 200 m wide. It was assumed that the canal would cut through the entire country - from Khanty-Mansiysk to the Aral itself. It will transport the waters of the Irtysh and the Ob to the dying lake. In addition, the waters of the Yenisei and Lena were going to be redirected to Central Asia.
However, experts noted that in order to drive water from Siberia to the Aral Sea (that is, from the bottom up), a huge amount of energy would be required and this project would bring more loss than profit. In addition, 200 m wide canals will block the natural migration routes of animals. This will lead to the extinction of the reindeer and other animals. In all the rivers of Siberia, the number of fish will sharply decrease - this threatens small indigenous peoples with starvation. The swamps of Western Siberia will begin to dry up. Finally, these initiatives will lead to water shortages in Altai, Kuzbass, Novosibirsk and Omsk. This project was opposed by the intellectual and cultural elite of the country: a number of scientists, writers, etc.
Aral Sea
Nevertheless, the authorities were determined to implement. The Ministry of Water Resources, without waiting for the project to be included in the five-year plan, purchased equipment with the allocated money and began work on turning the rivers ahead of schedule.
During this period, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. The economic situation begins to deteriorate, the country has debts never seen before. As a result, Gorbachev came to the conclusion that from now on the USSR could not afford such projects as river reversal. Then he decided to wrap up these initiatives under the environmental pretext. It could also bring political benefits: Gorbachev allowed public discussions on environmental issues, thus allowing a society that had accumulated irritation with the Soviet regime to let off some steam.
On August 14, 1986, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU decided to postpone the project and limit itself to scientific research on this issue.
Plan
Introduction
1 Project goals
2 Characteristics
2.1 Channel "Siberia-Central Asia"
2.2 Anti-Irtysh
3 History
4 Criticism
5 Perspectives
Bibliography
Introduction
The transfer of part of the flow of Siberian rivers to Kazakhstan and Central Asia (the turn of the Siberian rivers; the turn of the northern rivers) is a project to redistribute the river flow of the Siberian rivers and direct it to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and, possibly, Turkmenistan. One of the most ambitious engineering and construction projects of the 20th century.
1. Project goals
The main goal of the project was to direct part of the flow of the Siberian rivers (Irtysh, Ob and others) to the regions of the country that are in dire need of fresh water. The project was developed by the Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Resources of the USSR (Minvodkhoz). At the same time, a grandiose construction of a system of canals and reservoirs was being prepared, which would make it possible to transfer water from the rivers of the northern part of the Russian Plain to the Caspian Sea.
Project goals:
· transportation of water to the Kurgan, Chelyabinsk and Omsk regions of Russia for the purpose of irrigation and providing water to small towns;
· restoration of the shrinking Aral Sea;
· transportation of fresh water to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the purpose of irrigation;
· preservation of the system of extensive cotton growing in the republics of Central Asia;
opening of navigation through canals.
2. Characteristics
More than 160 organizations of the USSR worked on the project for about 20 years, including 48 design and survey and 112 research institutes (including 32 institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences), 32 union ministries and 9 ministries of the union republics. 50 volumes of text materials, calculations and applied scientific research and 10 albums of maps and drawings were prepared. The development of the project was managed by its official customer - the Ministry of Water Resources. The scheme for the integrated use of incoming water in the Aral Sea region was prepared by the Tashkent Institute "Sredaziprovodkhlopok".
2.1. Channel "Siberia-Central Asia"
The canal "Siberia - Central Asia" was the first stage of the project and was the construction of a water canal from the Ob through Kazakhstan to the south - to Uzbekistan. The channel was supposed to be navigable.
· Length of the channel - 2550 km.
Width - 130-300 m.
Depth - 15 m.
· Capacity - 1150 m³/s.
The preliminary cost of the project (water supply, distribution, agricultural construction and development, agricultural facilities) was 32.8 billion rubles, including: in the territory of the RSFSR - 8.3 billion, in Kazakhstan - 11.2 billion and in Central Asia - 13.3 billion The benefit from the project was estimated at 7.6 billion rubles of net income annually. The average annual profitability of the channel is 16% (according to the calculations of the State Planning Committee of the USSR (S. N. Zakharov) and Sovintervod (D. M. Ryskulova).
2.2. Anti-Irtysh
Anti-Irtysh - the second stage of the project. Water was planned to be sent back along the Irtysh, then along the Turgai trough to Kazakhstan, to the Amu Darya and Syr Darya.
It was supposed to build a hydroelectric complex, 10 pumping stations, a canal and one regulating reservoir.
3. History
For the first time, the project of transferring part of the flow of the Ob and Irtysh to the Aral Sea basin was developed by Ya. G. Demchenko (1842-1912), a graduate of Kiev University, in 1868. He proposed the initial version of the project in his essay “On the Climate of Russia”, when he was in the seventh grade of the 1st Kiev gymnasium, and in 1871 he published the book “On the flooding of the Aral-Caspian lowland to improve the climate of the adjacent countries” (the second edition of which was published in 1900).
In 1948, the Russian geographer academician Obruchev wrote about this possibility to Stalin, but he did not pay much attention to the project.
In the 1950s, Kazakh academician Shafik Chokin raised this issue again. Several possible river diversion schemes have been developed by various institutions. In the 1960s, water consumption for irrigation in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan increased dramatically, in connection with which all-Union meetings were held on this issue in Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Moscow, Novosibirsk.
In 1968, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU instructed the State Planning Commission, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and other organizations to develop a plan for the redistribution of river flow.
In 1971, the Irtysh-Karaganda irrigation canal was put into operation, built on the initiative of the Kazakh Scientific Research Institute of Energy. This canal can be considered as a completed part of the water supply project for central Kazakhstan.
In 1976, at the XXV Congress of the CPSU, the final project was chosen from the four proposed ones and a decision was made to start work on the implementation of the project.
On May 24, 1970, the resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 612 "On the prospects for the development of land reclamation, regulation and redistribution of river flow in 1971-1985" was adopted. “It declared the urgent need for the transfer of 25 cubic kilometers of water per year by 1985.” (.)
In 1976 (according to other sources - in 1978), Soyuzgiprovodkhoz was appointed General Designer, and the provision of project activities was included in the "Main Directions for the Development of the National Economy of the USSR for 1976-1980."
On November 26, 1985, the Bureau of the Department of Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences adopted a resolution “On the scientific inconsistency of the methodology for predicting the level of the Caspian and salinity of the Seas of Azov, used by the USSR Ministry of Water Resources in substantiating projects for transferring part of the flow of northern rivers to the Volga basin.”
During perestroika, it became clear that the Soviet Union (due to the deepening economic crisis) was not able to finance the project, and on August 14, 1986, at a special meeting of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, it was decided to stop work. In making this decision, numerous publications in the press of those years also played a role, the authors of which spoke out against the project and argued that it was catastrophic from an environmental point of view. A group of opponents of the transfer - representatives of the capital's intelligentsia organized a campaign to bring to the attention of the people who made key decisions (the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Council of Ministers), the facts of gross errors made in the development of all project documentation for the Ministry of Water Resources. In particular, negative expert opinions were prepared by five departments of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A group of academicians signed the acad. A. L. Yanshin (a geologist by profession) a letter to the Central Committee “On the catastrophic consequences of the transfer of part of the flow of northern rivers”. Academician L. S. Pontryagin wrote a personal letter to M. S. Gorbachev criticizing the project.
In 2002, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, called for the idea to be revived.
On July 4, 2009, during his visit to Astana, Yuri Luzhkov presented his book "Water and Peace". During the presentation of the book, Luzhkov once again spoke out in support of the project for the flow of part of the Siberian rivers into Central Asia.
In September 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced the need to restore the destroyed land reclamation system: “Unfortunately, the land reclamation system that was created in the Soviet period degraded and was destroyed. We will need to recreate it now.” Medvedev instructed the Russian government to develop an appropriate set of measures, noting: "If the dry period continues, then we simply cannot survive without land reclamation." The President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, invited Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev to return to the project of transferring the flows of Siberian rivers to the southern regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, which was discussed back in Soviet times: “in the future, Dmitry Anatolyevich, this problem may turn out to be very large, necessary to provide drinking water to the entire Central -Asian region". Medvedev noted that Russia is open to discussing various options for solving the problem of drought, including "some of the previous ideas that at some point were hidden under the carpet" .
4. Criticism
According to the environmentalists who have specially studied this project, the implementation of the project will cause the following adverse consequences:
· flooding of agricultural and forest lands by reservoirs;
· rise of groundwater along the entire length of the canal with flooding of nearby settlements and highways;
· death of valuable species of fish in the Ob River basin, which will lead, in particular, to the disruption of the traditional way of life of the indigenous peoples of the Siberian North;
· unpredictable changes in the permafrost regime;
· climate change, changes in the ice cover in the Gulf of Ob and the Kara Sea;
· formation on the territory of Kazakhstan and Central Asia along the route of the canal of swamps and solonchaks;
· Violation of species composition of flora and fauna in the territories through which the canal must pass;
5. Perspectives
According to experts of the Water Resources Committee of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan, by 2020 Kazakhstan's available surface water resources are expected to decrease from 100 km³ to 70 km³. If the war ends in Afghanistan, the country will take water from the Amu Darya for its needs. Then the reserves of fresh water in Uzbekistan will be halved.
At a press conference on September 4, 2006 in Astana, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev stated that it is necessary to reconsider the issue of turning the Siberian rivers into Central Asia.
Today, former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, Uzbek President Islam Karimov and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev are calling for the implementation of the project.
Modern estimates of the cost of the project are over $40 billion.
In October 2008, Yuri Luzhkov presented his new book "Water and Peace", dedicated to the revival of the plan to divert part of the flow of Siberian rivers to the south, but according to Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, such projects are only rarely economically viable.
In November 2008, Uzbekistan hosted a presentation of the Ob-Syrdarya-AmuDarya-Caspian Sea navigable canal project. The canal runs along the route: Turgai Valley - crossing the Syr Darya west of Dzhusala - crossing the Amu Darya in the Takhiatash region - then along Uzboy the canal goes to the port of Turkmenbashi on the Caspian Sea. The estimated depth of the channel is 15 meters, the width is over 100 meters, the design water loss for filtration and evaporation is not more than 7%. Parallel to the canal, it is also proposed to build a motorway and a railway, which together with the canal form a "transport corridor". The estimated cost of construction is 100-150 billion US dollars, construction duration is 15 years, the expected average annual profit is 7-10 billion US dollars, the payback of the project is 15-20 years after construction is completed.
The deaf Ural taiga is the land of endless forests, swamps and camps. The way of life in this backwater corner has changed little over the centuries. But in the spring of 1971, here, a hundred kilometers from the nearest major city, a seemingly unthinkable event occurred. On March 23, not far from the border of the Perm region and the Komi ASSR, three nuclear explosions were simultaneously heard, each with the power of a bomb that destroyed the Japanese Hiroshima.
From this atomic mushroom, which grew up in a godforsaken land, the implementation of probably the most ambitious project of the Soviet era began. Below we will talk about how the peaceful atom came to the hard-to-reach taiga to turn the rivers around.
Still, it was a romantic time. It seemed that in the near and certainly bright future, Soviet people would leave their traces on the dusty paths of distant planets, penetrate to the center of the Earth, and surf the surrounding expanses on airplanes. Against this background, the conquest of the great rivers looked like a task at least today. On the Volga and the rivers of Siberia, mighty hydroelectric power plants grew in cascades, but this was not enough: at the same time, an idea of a completely different scale was born in the capital's ministries and design institutes.
Rivers to Asia
These same already pacified rivers carried their waters into the icy Arctic seas. They did this, from the point of view of scientists and officials, in a completely useless way. At the same time, socialist Central Asia was languishing with thirst. Its hot steppes and deserts suffered from a lack of fresh water: local resources for agriculture were categorically lacking, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the Aral and Caspian Seas became shallow. In the late 1960s, the communist party and the Soviet government matured. The lower departments and the Academy of Sciences were instructed to develop a plan for "redistributing the flow of rivers", which went down in history under the biting name "Turn of the Siberian Rivers".
With the help of a grandiose system of canals with a total length of more than 2,500 kilometers, the waters of the Ob and Irtysh, Tobol and Ishim were supposed to go into the hot Central Asian sands, creating new fertile oases there.
Link two oceans
The maximum plan was stunning in its scope: it was ultimately planned to link the Arctic and Indian oceans with a single shipping route that would change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Ultimately, this plan was developed for about two decades, but already in the first approximation it was clear that the impossible - perhaps, especially in the 1960s, the price of the issue (both literally and figuratively) did not bother anyone. Technologically, the Soviet Union was ready to implement the project. Moreover, the theory has already been tested in practice. It was supposed to turn the rivers back with the help of the “peaceful atom”. Back in 1962, the energy of nuclear reactions, by that time already successfully put into service with the Soviet army, was decided to be used for peaceful purposes.
On the paper
On paper, everything looked perfect: a nuclear (and primarily thermonuclear) explosion was the most powerful and, at the same time, the cheapest source of energy known to man. With its help, it was planned to carry out seismic exploration and rock crushing, build underground gas storage facilities and intensify oil production. "Peaceful atomic explosions" were supposed to help in the construction of hydraulic structures, primarily reservoirs and canals.
atomic explosions
In the United States, a similar program, called Project Plowshare ("Project Ploughshare"), was launched in the late 1950s. The USSR is a little behind. In 1965, the first experimental nuclear explosion with a capacity of about 140 kilotons of TNT was carried out at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan. Its result was the formation of a funnel with a diameter of 410 meters and a depth of up to 100 meters. The funnel quickly filled with water from a nearby river, creating a small prototype reservoir. Its analogues, according to the idea of experts, were to appear in the arid regions of the Soviet Union, providing the needs of agriculture in fresh water.
Telchem
Three years later, experimental excavation (with the ejection of the rock outside) explosions brought to a new level. On October 21, 1968, at the same Semipalatinsk test site, the explosion of Tel'kem-1 took place with the formation of a single crater, and on November 12 - "Telkem-2". During the second experiment, three small nuclear charges (0.24 kilotons each) were blown up at once, which were laid in adjacent wells. Funnels from Telkem-2 were combined into one trench 140 m long and 70 m wide. It was a success: in practice, the possibility of laying the channel channel using atomic explosions was proved.
However, the explosions at the desert range were only part of the solution to this problem. In order to understand how safe it would be to carry out such work in an area inhabited by ordinary people, tests of a completely different kind were needed. At the very beginning of the 1970s, in the Ural forests located on the watershed of the Arctic Ocean and the Caspian Sea, in the Cherdynsky district of the Perm region, the military appeared - the implementation of the secret Taiga project began! Despite the relative desertion, the place was strategic. For centuries, people have used this bridge to deliver valuable goods from the Urals, from Siberia and the Volga region to the north. Usually the route ran from the south, from the Caspian Sea, through the Volga, Kama and tributaries of the latter.
Vasyukovo
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, the task changed radically: part of the flow of the northern Pechora had to be directed to the Kama and further to the shallow Caspian with the help of a special canal that would overcome the watershed. This, of course, was not a turn of the Siberian rivers (if only because the Pechora was a Ural river), but in fact an experimental implementation in practice of the same grandiose idea.
The site of the Taiga experiment is marked with a red circle. So, the Pechora River, which flowed into the Arctic Ocean, was planned to be connected with the Kolva River (Kama basin) by an artificial channel. The Taiga project assumed for its creation a large-scale series of 250 excavation nuclear explosions, similar in design to the successfully tested Telkem-2 experiment, adjusted for other climatic and natural conditions.
To assess the impact of the project on the environment and its possible consequences, only seven charges had to be activated at the first stage.
The selected point was a couple of kilometers from the small village of Vasyukovo and 20 km from the larger settlement of Chusovskoy.
wells
There are solid forests and swamps around, where only corrective labor colonies with residential settlements are scattered around. In this little, but still populated area, dispersing hordes of mosquitoes, military builders and engineers landed in 1970. Over the next few months, they prepared the site for an important test. A plot of innocent taiga was surrounded by a barbed wire fence to intimidate the population, especially the camp population.
Behind the fence, panel houses for specialists, laboratories, observation towers appeared, and control and measuring equipment based on Ural-375 trucks was also delivered there. But the main object was seven wells with a depth of 127 meters.
Wells with walls made of eight-layer 12-mm sheet steel were arranged in a chain at a distance of about 165 meters from each other. In the spring of 1971, special nuclear charges developed at the All-Russian Research Institute of Technical Physics from the secret city of Chelyabinsk-70 (now Snezhinsk) were lowered to the bottom of three of them. In the wells, the devices were bricked up with a three-layer backfill: first with gravel, then with graphite and cement plug. The power of each of the charges roughly corresponded to the "Kid" bomb dropped in 1945 by the Americans on Hiroshima - 15 kilotons of TNT. The combined yield of the three devices was 45 kilotons.
Memoirs of contemporaries
As planned, three underground Hiroshima ejected soil to a height of about 300 meters. Subsequently, he fell back to the ground, forming a kind of shaft around the circumference of the lake. The dust cloud rose two kilometers, eventually forming the well-known atomic mushroom, which fell into the picture of a bystander who was in one of the neighboring camp villages. “I lived then in Chusovsky.
We were asked to leave our houses before 12 noon and were warned: something was being prepared in the Vasyukovo district, it was dangerous to be in the buildings, - local resident Timofey Afanasyev told reporters many years later. - We already knew that some big work was being carried out there, the military arrived. What exactly is being done, we, of course, did not know. On that day, everyone obediently went out into the street.
Exactly at noon, we saw in the north, in the Vasyukovo region, and it was twenty kilometers away, a huge fireball. It was impossible to look at him, it hurt his eyes so much. The day was clear, sunny and completely cloudless. Almost at the same time, only a moment later, the shock wave came. We felt a strong shaking of the ground - as if a wave had passed through the earth. Then this ball began to stretch into a mushroom, and the black pillar began to rise up to a very high height. Then, as it were, it broke down below and fell towards the Komi territory. After that, helicopters, planes appeared and flew towards the explosion.
Funnels
Afanasiev did not exaggerate. The column really fell, as it was intended, to the north of the point of explosions - into the completely deserted swamps of the Komi-Perm border. However, although the experiment formally went off brilliantly, its results were not what the initiators of the experiment had hoped for. On the one hand, scientists and the military got what they wanted: an oblong funnel 700 m long, 380 m wide and up to 15 m deep. long years.
Radiation
However, from an environmental point of view, something went wrong. In the Taiga project, of course, thermonuclear charges were used, which were called "clean". About 94% of the energy of their explosions was provided by thermonuclear fusion reactions, which do not give radioactive contamination. However, the remaining 6%, obtained from "dirty" fissile materials, was enough to form a radioactive trace 25 km long.
Moreover, radioactive products from this test, albeit in a minimal amount, were found in Sweden and the United States, which already directly violated the international treaties of the Soviet Union.
Apparently, it was precisely this that "buried" in the future the idea of turning great rivers with the help of a peaceful atom. Already 2 years later, participants of one of the usual archaeological expeditions visited the site of the Taiga project. By this time, it was possible to freely enter the previously protected area, some buildings were still standing, a metal tower was still installed over the empty well, but the military had already left.
