LAKE BAIKAL — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Friday that he may reopen a paper mill after inspecting the bed of Lake Baikal and being told by scientists that the mill does not harm the environment.
<p>Workers at the paper mill, controlled by Oleg Deripaska, threatened hunger strikes and highway blockades after the loss-making mill closed down in October 2008.</p>

<p>The mill employs 2,000 people and is the main employer in the town of Baikalsk, which has a total population of 17,000. It also runs the only heating station in the Siberian town.</p>

<p>“First of all, we need to create jobs and only after that stop production,” said Putin, emerging after a 4 1/2-hour dive into the lake in a deep-water submersible. He said he “did not rule out” the mill being reopened.</p>

<p>Deripaska owns 51 percent of the mill through his investment vehicle Basic Element. The government owns 49 percent. Basic Element blamed the plant’s closure on a court decision, supported by ecologists, which banned the mill from disposing of wastewater into the lake. The ban also meant that the mill could not finish the full cellulose production cycle.</p>

<p>Scientists who accompanied Putin on his underwater trip told him that the paper mill did not do much damage to the unique lake.</p>

<p>“So far, industrial activity did not do much damage to Baikal. It cleans itself,” Oceanology Institute head Robert Nigmatullin told Putin.</p>

<p>“I see the bed of Lake Baikal, and it is clean,” Putin told reporters through a hydrophone from the submersible, which dived 1,400 meters into the lake. “Baikal is in good shape, there is practically no environmental damage,” he said afterward.</p>

<p>Scientists, who have studied the area around the mill from the two submersibles, said they found an increased content of cellulose in the area but no poisonous chemicals.</p>

<p>“We need to open the plant for the winter. Baikal lived with this plant for much longer and will survive for another eight months,” said Viktor Minayev, deputy head of the Lake Studies Institute.</p>

<p>Putin took advantage of the occasion to inspect potentially valuable gas crystals at the bottom of Baikal.</p>

<p>“I haven’t seen anything like that in my whole life. This is a very special feeling,” Putin told reporters upon emerging, looking pale and a bit dizzy after spending more than 4 1/2 hours underwater. Asked if he planned to travel in space after his supersonic flight and deep-sea dive, Putin, dressed in blue overalls, said, “No, there is enough work here on earth.”</p>

<p>Scientists estimate that Baikal hydrates contain over 1 trillion cubic meters of gas, an amount comparable with the world’s largest discovered gas fields. </p>