PREMIER PUTIN IS GOING TO THE SAYAN-SHUSHENSKOYE HYDROELECTRIC POWER PLANT
Power plant catastrophe plainly shows necessity of the modernization the national leaders talk about.
Premier Vladimir Putin is going to the Sayano-Shushenskoye Hydroelectric Power Plant where a special conference will be held. Some of the decisions the premier will have to make in Khakassia concern recompense to victims’ families. Others will deal with the anticipated rise of electricity tariffs in the region which Putin will have to try and prevent and uninterrupted deliveries of electric power to social and industrial objects.
Sources close to the Presidential Administration say that Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to the power plant was considered right after the catastrophe. It was eventually decided to send the premier there. As for Medvedev, he will bring up the subject of the Sayano-Shushenskoye Hydroelectric Power Plant at the conference on the socioeconomic development of the Siberian Federal Region in Buryatia.
Putin appraised technological discipline in Russia as intolerably low and ordered a revision of the infrastructure of all strategic objects throughout the country.
Political scientist Dmitry Badovsky called the matter of the Sayano-Shushenskoye Hydroelectric Power Plant a political issue rather than the matter of manual control.
“It is a major event that plainly exposes the problems of degradation of the infrastructure and confirms the necessity of modernization both national leaders regularly mention,” he said. “Granted that parallels are always questionable, but Chernobyl did have a colossal effect on what happened to the country afterwards. It is of paramount importance therefore for the leaders to tackle the matter from the standpoint of economic development in general…”