TASS, December 13. The Norilsk Nickel Company (Nornickel) will invest 12.4 billion rubles ($164 million) to 2026 in a system to monitor geotechnical parameters in the Norilsk Industrial District in the Krasnoyarsk region’s north, Deputy Director of the company’s Polar Division Alexei Devochkin told a business forum in Norilsk.

The geotechnical monitoring system will register temperatures of the perennially frozen ground under buildings and will point to basement deformations. The monitoring will highlight potentially hazardous defects or changes which may cause failures of buildings and structures.

"Under the project, we will install sensors on about 1,500 buildings in the Norilsk Industrial District," the company’s representative said. "Investments in 2021-2022 will make 2.4 billion rubles ($27 million), and in 2023-2026 - more than 10 billion rubles ($137 million)."

The sensors will be installed on residential houses, he added, saying the program had been working as a pilot project. Earlier, the company reported a similar system installed at the diesel fuel storage, where a fuel spill occurred in 2020.

In May, 2020, a tank at the Norilsk power station unsealed releasing 20,000 tonnes of fuel. One of the versions says the accident could have been caused by the global climate changes, namely by the soil warming. The Krasnoyarsk Region’s Arbitration Court partially satisfied a claim by the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resource Usage (Rosprirodnadzor) and a fine of 146 billion rubles ($2 billion). Nornickel has settled the fine.