Reversal of rivers in the USSR. Project for the diversion of part of the flow of the northern and Siberian rivers
How can you suddenly take such beauty and turn it in the opposite direction? Photo from the official website www.rusgidro.ru
The scope of Russian engineering thought is wide. One of the clearest examples of an idea that seems practically unrealistic to an ordinary person was the transfer of Siberian rivers from north to south in order to water dry regions. True, this plan was not implemented due to its technological complexity. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was generally buried, but, as it turned out, not for long. Today, talk about the revival of the project is heard louder and louder.
It all started in 1868, when the Russian-Ukrainian public figure Yakov Demchenko, at that time still a student, developed a project to transfer part of the flow of the Ob and Irtysh to the Aral Sea basin. In 1871, an enterprising young man even published a book "On the flooding of the Aral-Caspian lowland to improve the climate of the adjacent countries," but the Imperial Academy of Sciences did not take Demchenko's work seriously.
The Aral is "drying" along the Irtysh
Almost a century later, the idea of turning the rivers surfaced. Kazakh academician Shafik Chokin returned to this issue. The scientist was concerned about the problem of the gradual drying of the Aral Sea. And his fears were not unreasonable - the main sources of the Aral water, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, spread over cotton and rice fields, taking most of the water for themselves. There was a real threat of the disappearance of the Aral Sea. In this case, billions of tons of salt powder with a toxic composition could settle over a large area and adversely affect people's lives.
The Kazakh academician was heard, 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. This project, in fact, perfectly fit into the Soviet policy of nature development. Slogans about the conquest of the latter were among the important ideologies of the Soviet power. Man, according to the ideas of that time, should have conquered, overthrown and transformed nature. Unfortunately, often the actions of the authorities in this direction were accompanied by an absolute lack of understanding of environmental problems and were based solely on economic benefits.
Such large-scale projects were characteristic of the leading powers. And here's an example: at the same time, in 1968, US President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the construction of the "Central Arizona Canal". The main point of the idea was to irrigate arid regions, as in the case of the USSR.
In the United States, its implementation began five years later and was completed. Construction was completed in 1994, and today the Central Arizona Canal is the largest and most expensive canal system in the United States. 18 years and $5 billion later, the channel opened in Phoenix. The Colorado River has flooded for 330 miles, now flowing through the Southern Desert, helping to keep local cotton, vegetable and citrus farmers in the area afloat. This canal has become a true lifeblood for the inhabitants of the region.
Academicians tore off the stopcock
In May 1970, that is, two years later, as the Central Committee instructed to develop a transfer plan, Resolution No. 612 “On the prospects for the development of land reclamation, regulation and redistribution of river flow in 1971–1985” was adopted. Preparatory work began - the specialists were faced with the task of transferring 25 cubic meters. km of water annually by 1985.
A year after Decree No. 612 was adopted, the irrigation and watering canal Irtysh-Karaganda, 458 km long, came into operation. In part, he solved the problem of reclamation of a number of Kazakhstani lands.
And work began to boil - for almost 20 years, under the leadership of the Ministry of Water Resources, more than 160 Soviet organizations, including 48 design and survey and 112 research institutes (including 32 from the structure of the USSR Academy of Sciences) puzzled over how best to "turn" the rivers .
Together with them, 32 union ministries and 9 ministries of the union republics worked on the project. The diligence of hundreds of specialists resulted in 50 volumes of text materials, calculations and applied scientific research, as well as 10 albums of maps and drawings.
But the rivers were not destined to "turn around". Society did not support such an initiative, devastating articles were published in the press, which spoke of serious environmental consequences.
For example, the Novy Mir magazine of fiction and social thought organized a major expedition to the Aral Sea region in 1988. It included writers, journalists, environmentalists, photographers and documentary filmmakers. After the trip, the participants made an official appeal to the government of the country, in which they analyzed the current situation in Central Asia. It also gave recommendations for solving environmental and social problems without such a gross intervention in nature.
These protest emotions were reinforced by the expert opinions of the Academy of Sciences. Moreover, a group of academicians (the so-called Yanshin Commission) signed a letter prepared by the outstanding academician, naturalist and geologist Alexander Yanshin to the Central Committee “On the catastrophic consequences of diverting part of the flow of northern rivers.” In 1986, at a special meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, it was decided to stop work. It is believed that it was the Yanshin Commission that had a decisive influence on the refusal of the USSR leadership from the project.
Salvation from warming
The unfortunate Siberian rivers did not remain calm for long. In 2002, at that time, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, remembered this idea and undertook to bring it to life. He set to work so zealously that in July 2009, during a visit to Astana, he presented a book under the symbolic title "Water and Peace", in which he openly spoke out in support of the project to transfer part of the Siberian rivers to Central Asia.
“This is not a turn of the rivers, but the use of 5–7% of the grandiose flow of the Siberian river in order to give water to 4–5 regions of our state,” the mayor of the capital said then. In his opinion, Russia has always had an interest in this project, because "water has become a commodity and, very importantly, is a renewable resource."
In the new millennium, the idea of turning rivers sparkled with new colors - at the beginning of the 21st century, the project began to be seen as a means of combating global warming. Today, experts say that the volume of fresh water supplied to the Arctic Ocean by Siberian rivers is growing. There is evidence that the Ob has become fuller by 7% over the past 70 years.
For Ob, of course, you can rejoice. But one clear consequence of the increase in fresh water in the north could be a worsening of the climate in Europe. As the British weekly New Scientist writes, the increase in the flow of fresh water into the Arctic Ocean will reduce its salinity and ultimately lead to a significant change in the regime of the warm Gulf Stream. Europe is threatened with serious cooling, and redirecting the flow of Siberian rivers somewhere could save it from this. In this regard, the Europeans, not wanting to freeze in winter, joined the Asian countries, in whose souls there is still hope that the Siberian rivers will turn in their direction.
Drought Threat
A year after the presentation of Luzhkov's book - in 2010 - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made a statement that the land reclamation system created in Soviet times had degraded, part of it had been destroyed and everything needed to be restored again. By the way, 2010 turned out to be a difficult, dry year, and the president was concerned about the problem of drought. But, judging by the then political realities, perhaps Dmitry Anatolyevich was concerned about the energy not so much of the rivers as of Luzhkov himself.
At this time, the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, suggested that the Russian leader return to the project of diverting rivers to the south. Thus, Luzhkov had a serious like-minded person.
“In the future, Dmitry Anatolyevich, this problem may turn out to be very big, necessary to provide drinking water to the entire Central Asian region,” Nursultan Nazarbayev said at the forum of cross-border cooperation between the two countries in Ust-Kamenogorsk.
Medvedev then noted that Russia was ready to discuss options, even including "some previous ideas that at some point were shelved."
And the “water” issue in the world is long overdue. For example, in a report by US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, presented a couple of years ago, it was said that a number of countries in 10 years will experience a real shortage of drinking water. According to the Americans, this will not lead to international conflicts, but "the water in the common basins will be increasingly used as a lever of influence." “The likelihood of using water as a weapon or a means to achieve terrorist goals will also increase,” the report says.
The UN predicted the problems associated with the lack of water even earlier. In December 2003, at the 58th session of the General Assembly, 2005-2015 was declared the International Decade for Action “Water for Life”.
In connection with such sentiments, the diversion of water can play into the hands of the Russian authorities for two reasons. The first is, of course, their transfer to needy regions - of course, for a lot of money. The second is that assistance to the Aral Sea will contribute to the entry of the presidency of Vladimir Putin into the annals of world history. So, according to Viktor Brovkin, a climate modeling specialist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, if Vladimir Putin wanted to respond to the US Mars project with something as ambitious, building a canal from Siberia to the Aral would be the best fit for this. .
"Superchannel"
So what is the project "Turning of the Siberian rivers" today? Experts are unanimous - they have already seen all this somewhere. One can recall the construction of a conduit from the Great American Lakes to Mexico City or the Chinese project to save the Yellow River, which is drying up in the north, at the expense of the full-flowing southern Yangtze River.
Yuri Luzhkov proposed to build a water intake station near Khanty-Mansiysk and extend a 2,500 km long canal from it from the confluence of the Ob and the Irtysh to the south, to the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers flowing into the Aral.
"Superkanal" is planned to be dug 200 wide and 16 m deep. The Ob will lose about 27 cubic meters per year. km of water (approximately 6–7%) of its annual runoff (its entire discharge is 316 cubic km). The amount of water entering the Aral Sea will exceed more than 50% of the water that entered it earlier. In general, the bulk of the water will be directed to the Chelyabinsk and Kurgan regions, as well as to Uzbekistan. There are plans to bring the channel to Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. In the future, water intake from the Ob should increase by 10 cubic meters. km - these millions of liters, as Yuri Luzhkov noted, will go to dehydrated Uzbekistan.
It seems that work has already begun, because back in 2004, the director of Soyuzvodoproekt, Igor Zonn, in an interview with the British weekly New Scientist, said that his department was starting to revise previous plans for diverting the flow of Siberian rivers. To do this, in particular, materials will have to be collected from more than 300 institutes.
In June 2013, the Ministry of Regional Development of Kazakhstan presented a general scheme for the development of the country, developed jointly with one of the branches of JSC "Kazakh Research and Design Institute of Construction and Architecture" (KazNIISA). The authors proposed to turn the bed of the Irtysh and direct the waters to the territory of Kazakhstan. Such a sip of water will only benefit the Kazakhs, they say. The project document was to enter into force on January 1, 2014. It took three decades to implement.
For some reason, it is impossible to believe in the nobility of the Russian authorities. The obvious benefit of a large-scale project is striking. The economy of the Central Asian states, in particular Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, depends solely on cotton. They are today the largest consumers of water per capita in the world. The countries themselves have exacerbated their situation by implementing incompetent and environmentally destructive economies. The Cotton Monopoly is a prime example of this.
The Amudarya and Syrdarya are strong full-flowing rivers, together they carry more water than, for example, the royal Nile. But their water does not reach the Aral Sea, part of it goes into the sand, and part into irrigation systems with a length of about 50 thousand km. At the same time, local irrigation systems are in need of repair and modernization, because of their deterioration, up to 60% of water simply does not reach the fields.
"What we have? In Russia - uncontrolled floods, and in Central Asia - the ecological catastrophe of the Aral Sea, water reserves here will only decrease every year. Can Russia help? Maybe. But we have our own interests. This is not charity - we are talking about benefits for Russia, ”said Yuri Luzhkov in 2003 in an interview with Arguments and Facts. But the question is - can such a turn of Asia be affordable?
Expert opinions differ. Some cry about terrible consequences, others talk about opening horizons.
According to environmentalists, the turn of the Siberian rivers is likely to turn into a disaster. Director of the Russian branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Igor Chestin confirmed to Interfax several years ago that in the coming decades Central Asia will indeed face an acute shortage of water, but this problem cannot be solved with the help of Siberian rivers. The same opinion is shared by the program director of Greenpeace Russia Ivan Blok.
Those skeptics again...
Let's try to figure out what consequences may arise for Russia if the project is implemented. According to the head of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nikolai Dobretsov, "the turn threatens the Ob River basin with an ecological catastrophe and a socio-economic disaster."
Ecologists put forward various hypotheses, but here are the main adverse effects that the new “twist” will cause: agricultural and forest lands will be flooded with reservoirs; groundwater will rise throughout the canal and may flood nearby communities and roads; valuable species of fish will perish in the Ob River basin, which will complicate the life of the indigenous peoples of the Siberian North; the permafrost regime will change unpredictably; the salinity of the waters of the Arctic Ocean will increase; the climate and ice cover in the Gulf of Ob and the Kara Sea will change; the species composition of flora and fauna will be disturbed in the territories through which the canal will pass.
There are also doubts about the economic benefits of building a canal. For example, according to RAS Corresponding Member Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, there is a very small chance that this project will become economically viable. According to his calculations, the construction of the main canal will require at least $ 300 billion. And in general, sectors of water use intensification will soon develop on the world market: water-saving and water-efficient technologies, as well as methods for ensuring high water quality in natural objects. And for such countries as Russia and Brazil, which have large reserves of fresh water, it is more profitable not to trade this natural “commodity”.
But the problem is that, unlike water, money has a different nature and a different power of influence. It is unlikely that the authorities will be afraid to slightly flood Russian lands if the end result promises mountains of gold. In the current realities, this can play into the hands of Russia, which can heroically save Europe from cold winters, at the same time strengthen its influence in Asia and write itself into history. At what price this will be done is a separate question, but looking back at the Olympics and Crimea, it seems that the Kremlin will not stand up for the price.
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 an empty well, but the military had already left.
This story has its continuation in all our cities today, and in the future it will lead to a war in Russia. 99.99%
The project of "turning" the northern rivers "backward" is already more than a hundred years old. It originated under Alexander the Third, the author is some kind of young engineer. The point is the following. There is a huge excess of water in Siberia, from which there is no benefit but harm - annual floods lick off a bunch of villages and small towns. And to the south-west lie the exceptionally fertile lands of only the annexed Middle East. Asia. With an excellent climate, but the complete absence of water. All the new lands of the Russian Empire could become one continuous Ferghana Valley, the fruits of which we as a whole country eat to this day in the fall and not only. Look at the map, how small it is. And almost all of Wed can be so fertile. Asia.
It is separated from Siberia not by such a long hill, but by a slight elevation difference, about a hundred meters. The idea arose to create a large reservoir in the south of Siberia, in which to accumulate flood waters, and later transfer them through a system of canals to Asia. Collect from the rivers, of course, also through the canal system. So, the whole project, in fact, boils down to the construction of these canals. No turning back the rivers!
In the late USSR, this grandiose (geopolitical!) task was finally approached closely. And then the "environmentalists" raised a howl: "the brutal enemies of nature, the communists want to turn the rivers back!" They were conducted from the West, this is now known, the details were set out by S.G. Kara-Murza. It is understandable, the implementation of the idea led to great stability in the USSR, and immediately solved a bunch of problems, and even food - everything. And, forever. Wed Asia would forever be fastened to Russia, becoming simply its organic part without the slightest international agitation. The local population would not have to migrate anywhere. On the contrary, the movement of the Slavs, and even the Baltic states, to Asia would begin. She would start to really Russify. And the prospect of an ethnic war in Russia would never have loomed, which now, alas, seems to be absolutely inevitable. This is what the failure of this undertaking means. Neither more nor less.
Both Putin and the entire Liquidcom are well aware of this. But they prefer to create jobs for migrants in our cities, and not on the construction of those channels for which Asians would kiss us in the diaphragm until the end of time. Water is what is called their age-old dream. Centuries-old! And the elder brother Urus could fulfill it with a huge profit for himself. But the Urus did not give water, the janitor Fringe threw a snowball, now there will be Allah Akbar, the ax head, the damage is sour! 99.99%
All this could become a constructive program of Russian nationalists. For now all their "constructive" comes down to a proposal to shoot off the heads of the Churkestani janitors so that they don't pile our snow in their stupid heaps.
The idea of transferring part of the runoff of the rivers of Western Siberia to Central Asia was first expressed in 1868 by the schoolboy Yakov Demchenko, who later wrote the book "On the flooding of the Aral-Caspian lowland to improve the climate of the adjacent countries." In 1948, the geographer and writer Vladimir Obruchev again came up with this idea, and since 1968.
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 May 1970, the Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On the prospects for the development of land reclamation, regulation and redistribution of river flow in 1971-1985" was adopted.
In 1971, the irrigation and watering canal Irtysh - Karaganda, built on the initiative of the Kazakh Research Institute of Energy, came into operation. It was supposed to be part of a project to provide water to central Kazakhstan.
In 1976, at the XXV Congress of the CPSU, the final project was selected from the four proposed ones, and a decision was made to start work on the implementation of the project. 185 co-executing organizations worked on it, including 48 design and survey and 112 research institutes (including 32 institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences), 32 union ministries and nine 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 project intended to divert part of the flow of the Irtysh River near the confluence with the Ob. Water was supposed to go to Central Asia through a canal 2.5 thousand kilometers long, 200 wide and 16 meters deep. The total volume of water was to be about 30 cubic kilometers per year.
At the same time, the regions of Russia in the initial section of the route would get 4.9 cubic kilometers of water, Northern Kazakhstan - 3.4 cubic kilometers, 16.3 cubic kilometers to feed the Syrdarya and Amudarya rivers, including Uzbekistan - 10 cubic kilometers. The design water loss during transportation was to be about 3 cubic kilometers (12% of the total).
Due to this water, 1.5 million hectares of land in Russia and 2 million hectares in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were to be irrigated. The functioning of the system was supposed to be supported by five pumping stations with an annual energy consumption of about 10.2 gigawatt-hours, for their maintenance it was planned to build a nuclear power plant in the Chelyabinsk region.
The general conclusion of the designers is that the implementation of the project will have a significant national economic effect: it will facilitate the solution of the food problem, increase the production of an export product (cotton), investments will pay off in eight to ten years, and the accompanying negative effects can be completely overcome.
It was planned to start the project in 1985, by 1984 the deadlines had been shifted to 2000.
At the end of 2002, Yuri Luzhkov, then mayor of Moscow, proposed to revive the project of transferring part of the flow of Siberian rivers to Central Asia. The technical side of the proposal of the capital's mayor was to lay a canal from Khanty-Mansiysk to Kazakhstan and Central Asia and use 6-7% of the total water volume of the Ob River for sale to agricultural and industrial producers in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and, possibly, Turkmenistan.
In 2008, Luzhkov presented his book "", dedicated to this problem.
According to Luzhkov, the topic of transferring part of the river flow 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 channel will be about $ 200 billion, which will make the project.
According to RAS Corresponding Member Alexei Yablokov, the project reanimated by Yuri Luzhkov to transfer part of the flow of northern rivers to arid regions, in addition to gigantic unjustified costs, will lead to huge territories in Russia.
In May 2016, Russian Minister of Agriculture Alexander Tkachev said that Russia could offer China to discuss a project 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.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
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 allow the water of the rivers of the northern part of the Russian Plain to be transferred 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 Kyiv 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 Kyiv 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. Numerous publications in the press of those years also played a role in making such a decision, 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 drought problem, including "some of the old ideas that at some point were tucked 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 to the 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.