On a warm, overcast day in late April, Toktobek Berdibekov, a 72-year-old man with a pointy white beard, sat on a tapchan – an outdoor bed – sipping green tea from a bowl and looking out at the hundreds of apple and cherry trees blossoming in his orchard. As his four youngest grandchildren played in the garden, he proudly pointed out a chicken coop, a fish pond and the red-brick house that he’d recently built for his youngest son – all of which were funded with the profits from the literal fruits of his labour. “It’s paradise,” he told me.
Berdibekov’s paradise lies in Kyrgyzstan’s Mailuu-Suu valley, a lush strip of greenery nestled along a river between red-pink cliffs. It’s also just outside the 500-metre safety perimeter that surrounds one of the most hazardous uranium-waste sites in the former Soviet Union. The nearby town of Mailuu-Suu was once a centre for uranium mining and processing, which involved milling uranium ore to extract a powder known as yellowcake. After the mines were closed in 1968, the grey, sand-like radioactive residue was covered with soil in 23 “tailings ponds” – a mining term describing sites where waste is dumped and dammed off from water sources – across the valley.
Over the past three decades, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have sought to clean up abandoned Soviet-era uranium-mining sites with the help of international aid and experts. Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear-power company, has led some of these efforts; others, including those in Mailuu-Suu, have been funded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Work on securing Mailuu-Suu’s tailings ponds was nearly completed when, in 2023, engineers from G.E.O.S., a German sub-contractor, discovered that the dams preventing two of the tailings ponds from leaking waste into the Mailuu-Suu river were structurally unsound. | | |
