Nastassia Astrasheuskaya in a very chilly (-27°F/-32.8°C) Novaya Chara, Russia reporting, with additional reporting from the FT's Natural resources editor in a relatively balmy London:
Miners place next bets on Russia with $15bn copper plans https://t.co/EVeMQ8Rx6F
— Neil Hume (@humenm) February 2, 2022
She starts off with:
Russian scientists once considered detonating a nuclear explosion as the best way to start mining at Udokan, one of the world’s largest untapped copper resources. That was in 1965, and technology has moved on, but the deposit — 400km north of the Chinese border in the permafrost of eastern Siberia — still represents a formidable challenge to geologists and engineers....Which was the first thing that came to mind when I was writing about the other big project, Baimskaya in the Siberian Arctic:
"KAZ Minerals To Install Four Small Nuclear Power Plants To Serve Giant Arctic Copper Mine"
That sounds almost 1950's Soviet: "Okay comrade, we'll reverse the flow of that river there, build a landing strip for the nuclear powered aircraft, set the nuke plants down over by the river and if we have any fissionable material left over we'll build a couple bombs to loosen the permafrost on the way to the ore body."....
