World’s top copper producer closes smelter in ‘Chile’s Chernobyl’

Chile’s deliver-owned Codelco copper firm, the realm’s top producer of the metal, closed its Ventanas smelter Wednesday in an condominium dubbed “Chile’s Chernobyl” for the grim environmental impact of heavy alternate.

The smelter’s operational boss Pablo Bohler symbolically gave the account for for the shutdown after six a long time of operation in an condominium that also hosts vegetation and factories of more than a dozen other companies.

Codelco’s nearby copper refinery will dwell operational.

Codelco announced it would conclude the Ventanas smelter after an incident in June final year when more than 100 folks, largely schoolchildren, suffered sulfur dioxide poisoning in the condominium round Quintero and Puchuncavi — two coastal cities that are home to some 50,000 folks.

It had been the second such incident in three days.

Quintero and Puchuncavi have been deemed “sacrifice zones” since 1958, when the Chilean govt converted what had been a fishing and farming community into an industrial hub.

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The condominium now hosts four coal-fired vitality stations as well to oil and copper refineries.

Greenpeace described the condominium round the Ventanas plant as “Chile’s Chernobyl” following a severe incident in 2018 when round 600 folks were treated for symptoms similar to vomiting blood, headaches, dizziness and paralysis of the extremities.

“Recently the furnaces of the smelter are extinguished, but now not the conviction of constructing a fairer Chile throughout which all inhabitants have the lawful to are living their lives” in security, President Gabriel Boric acknowledged Wednesday.

Some of the smelter’s 766 workers will be moved to other jobs, whereas the rest will leave Codelco under a severance take care of the firm that supplies eight p.c of the realm’s copper.

Final year, Chile’s environmental superintendent ordered six companies working in the condominium to “limit their productive exercise, without harming the primary provide” and suggested that measures be taken to lower air pollution from Codelco operations.

Source: AFP