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Legacy of waste

Restoration of communist-era industrial sites to last another 20 years

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 3rd, 2007 issue

ČTK
The cleansing of the groundwater at the closed Stráž uranium mine will cost 41 billion Kč and finish in 2035.
Despite keeping tight controls on nearly every aspect of commerce in the former Czechoslovakia, the communist regime that ruled for decades made no effort to regulate industry’s impact on the environment. The result was disastrous for the air, water and land.
“Frankly speaking, the environment of the former Czechoslovakia was, in one word, catastrophic,” says Jakub Kašpar, spokesman for the Environment Ministry.
Now, the country is paying a debt long overdue, funding the multibillion-crown efforts of a spate of companies to right the ecological wrongs of last century.
So far, about 35 billion Kč ($1.8 billion) has been spent to undo the damage, and the process is far from over — in fact, it has barely begun. The cost of the cleanup should total around 159 billion Kč after it is completed in another 15 to 20 years, says Jakub Haas, spokesman for the Finance Ministry.
By the early 1990s, there were more than 2,000 contaminated sites listed nationwide, Kašpar says. Of those, 800 have been cleaned and the rest are in the process of decontamination. But that list could grow, as another 1,500 locations are being surveyed for inclusion in the list.
“But I would say that the process of cleaning up the old ecological burden is going as well as possible in real circumstances,” he says.
Chemopetrol in Litvínov, north Bohemia, is a company undertaking one of the larger cleanups.
“The pollution that began in 1941 … consisted of crude oil and tar residue from fuel production, ammonium ions from waste water and sediment from refinery production,” says Pavel Veselý, a spokesman of Unipetrol, the parent company of Chemopetrol.
Of 11 polluted areas on the Chemopetrol site, four have been completely redeveloped since the company was privatized in 1994 and the remaining seven are being cleaned, he says.
The government is expected to pay 3.6 billion Kč to redevelop the entire site by 2016.
Coal mining, another dirty business, inflicted massive ecological damage in some parts of the country. The Industry and Trade Ministry is now administering two programs to help restore the countryside and its economy, says spokesman Tomáš Bartovský. One program pays for the restoration of lakes and woods; the other helps former coal miners who have since lost their jobs.
On top of an estimated 159 billion Kč that the government is expected to pay out, companies will also spend billions to clean their sites.
Diamo, the state-owned uranium mining company, is contributing about 640 million Kč of its own funds to what is expected to be an 80-billion-Kč restoration of the Rožná mining complex in west Moravia. Earlier this year, the government extended mining at Rožná for an indefinite period; wholescale remediation won’t begin until after mining stops.
Ludvík Kašpar, a spokesman for Diamo, says another large uranium mine, the inactive deposit at Stráž pod Ralskem, north Bohemia, will cost 41 billion Kč to clean by 2035. In the process, about 3.7 million tons of contaminants — largely sulfuric acid used to leach the uranium out of the soil — will be withdrawn from the ground. The acid now contaminates more than 300 million cubic meters (984 cubic feet) of water in the Cenomanian aquifer beneath Stráž.
Although the government is investing billions to atone for the sins of the socialists, and Kašpar from the Environment Ministry says air quality, nature and biodiversity have “substantially improved,” there is still cause for concern, mostly about the increasing ecological damage being done today.
The biggest risk now, he says, is in air polluted by vehicle exhaust, byproducts of heating with fossil fuels and the treatment of household garbage.
“The problem is not improving; the trend is negative,” Kašpar says. “There are many new problems connected to new situations and the evolution of modern contemporary society.”

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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