The radioactive flood threatening Central Asia’s breadbasket
What it’s like to live with nuclear waste on your doorstep
By Yan Matusevich
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.
Water is slowly seeping into the tailings ponds, turning the radioactive waste into mush and destabilising the dams; in turn, heavy rains cause small amounts of this waste to trickle into the river.
“We initially thought we could just stabilise the existing dams, but they’re beyond repair,” Falk Wagner, a civil engineer and the head of international projects at G.E.O.S., told me.
Poisoned paradise? Toktobek Berdibekov (top) prefers to focus on the positives of living in Mailuu-Suu. He owns a productive orchard not far from the former uranium mines (bottom)Scientists like Wagner now believe that an earthquake above 5.0 in magnitude or a major mudslide – common enough occurrences in this area – might cause these unstable dams to collapse entirely.
Evacuating Mailuu-Suu would then be the least of the trouble.
The river would flood with nearly 1m cubic metres of radioactive waste, which would then flow into the fertile Fergana valley in neighbouring Uzbekistan – contaminating the crops and water supply of at least 16m people.
Nemat Mаmbеtov, the head of Mailuu-Suu’s health department as well as its radioactivity-monitoring lab, told me that “small bits of liquefied uranium sludge would be spread across irrigation fields,” making a successful clean-up downstream in Uzbekistan “impractical”.
The poisoning of the Fergana valley – which, in addition to being the most densely populated area in Central Asia, is a big producer of fruits and vegetables, wheat, cotton and raw silk – would cause economic and social turmoil across the region, potentially affecting even Russia, which maintains close political and trading ties with Central Asian countries.
To avert catastrophe, G.E.O.S. has recommended that the uranium waste in the tailings ponds be moved to a dumping ground higher up the valley and 12km away from the river.
The EBRD and the Kyrgyz government are lobbying international donors to help with the necessary funding – an estimated $23m – to carry out this work.
But so far they have been unsuccessful.
In the meantime, engineers and government officials have organised meetings in Mailuu-Suu’s House of Culture, the Soviet-era equivalent of a community centre, to explain the urgent need to remove the uranium waste.
Although the locals have no power themselves over how the clean-up efforts will be conducted, the scientists hope to win public support for their scheme and to reassure residents that the work will be done responsibly.
Piecemeal attempts to clean up the radioactive waste in Mailuu-Suu since 2004 have been messy, and many people are sceptical that further work would only exacerbate the problem.
(As one local told me, “I want my town to have a future.
If they transport the waste away, but leave the radioactive dust behind, we may only see adverse effects many years down the road.”)
In addition, people have little trust in government officials, given the profusion of corruption scandals among Kyrgyzstan’s increasingly authoritarian political elite.
Those with doubts about the safety of the clean-up fear speaking out.
None of the sceptics I spoke to agreed to go on the record.
Soviet legacies A golden bust of Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin still stands outside Mailuu-Suu Medical College (top)Most locals, however, are blasé about the threat of the dams collapsing: they tend to be more worried about making a living.
Berdibekov, who had spent 11 dull years working as a guard on the road leading to the processing plant, bought his land after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now, his apples and cherries are sold in Russia, bringing his family of 12 a steady income.
The question of whether his bounty had been contaminated didn’t seem to have crossed his mind.
“If my fruits pass all Russian inspections, then of course you can eat it!” he assured me.
Even so, Berdibekov wants to see the tailings ponds removed: he is tired of the negative attention they bring to the Mailuu-Suu valley.
When I probed him about whether he is afraid of the radiation, though, he was quick to change the subject and point out the lushness of his garden.
“The best way to deal with the radiation is to turn the entire area into a garden.
[People] say radiation is scared of humidity and shade,” he told me.
Situated 8km downstream from the tailings ponds, the town of Mailuu-Suu, which has a population of 26,000, bears few signs of its uranium-mining past.
The centre – with its wide tree-lined streets and ornate brick apartment buildings – seems to have more in common with a Central European spa town than the gloomy post-industrial cities of the region.
On Lenin Street, a busy shopping avenue, children lined up at the milkshake stand after school.
Teenagers on Chinese dirt bikes cruised past the cinema-turned-disco and a bustling park filled with rides.
Those with doubts fear speaking out.
None of the sceptics I spoke to agreed to go on the record
Outside the entrance to the Mailuu-Suu Medical College, a groundskeeper perched on a ladder sprayed gold paint onto a bust of Lenin, which faced the street bearing his name.
“Today’s Lenin’s birthday, you see,” explained Anna Travkina, the deputy director, before leading me to her office.
Medical students in neat white coats and old-fashioned nurses’ hats greeted her respectfully as we passed them in the halls.
Travkina, a chatty 72-year-old woman in a black skirt and purple sweater, guards the institutional memory of Mailuu-Suu: she teaches a class to first-year nursing students on the history and ecology of the area, runs the local museum about the legacy of uranium mining and acts as the town’s unofficial archivist.
Travkina, who comes from an ethnically Moldovan family, was born and raised in Mailuu-Suu.
From the house her father built on the river’s banks, she witnessed the aftermath of the devastating landslide of 1958, which caused the destruction of a tailings dam and sent 600,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste into the river.
Travkina, who was six years old at the time, has vivid memories of trees crashing down, livestock drowning and entire houses floating down the river, which had turned black: “Everything in our garden was covered in grey-yellow sludge that looked like sour cream.”
She and her family were forced temporarily to live in military barracks while their yard was cleaned up.
Great secrecy surrounded uranium mining in the Soviet Union, meaning the true scale of the contamination or its impact has never been made public.
Yet the disaster is indelible in the memories of the few people still in town who experienced it.
“We played on uranium waste as kids, can you believe it?” Travkina asked me.
She, like many people in the area, speculates that such exposure may have been harmful.
“Look, I’m still alive, and we have 85-year-olds in town who are in great health,” she said. “But that yellowcake definitely killed my uncle.
He died young, didn’t make it to 60.”
“Everyone is busy trying to make a living as migrants in Russia, building houses for their families”
Rakhmanbek Toichuev, the 79-year-old director of the Institute of Medical Problems in Osh – Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city, located 200km south of Mailuu-Suu – also believes that prolonged exposure to radiation in the area has damaged locals’ health.
Since 2004, he has conducted research on exposure to radiation in the Mailuu-Suu valley.
With no reliable government statistics available, Toichuev and his team have gone door-to-door to record residents’ health complaints.
“We have over 1,000 confirmed cases of congenital disorders, high rates of thyroid disease, typhus and miscarriages,” he explained.
Current radiation levels in Mailuu-Suu are generally within Kyrgyzstan’s legal norm.
Even so, Toichuev was adamant that any continued exposure remained dangerous for locals: “The tailings ponds are a ticking time bomb – removing them is the only way forward.”
A long shadow As a child, Anna Travkina (top and bottom) witnessed the 1958 landslide that released 600,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste into the river. She now runs Mailuu-Suu’s museum about the legacy of uranium miningTravkina, the deputy director of the medical college, is frustrated that her students, as well as some locals, don’t always understand why the tailings ponds must be moved.
“For the younger generation, the uranium waste threat is abstract,” she told me. She attributes the scepticism among her neighbours to fear and gossip.
One afternoon, I joined her and her friend and neighbour Iman Koychiev, a 60-year-old retired factory worker and YouTuber who blogs about local current events, for tea in Travkina’s apartment.
As Travkina arranged sweets on the coffee table, Koychiev told me that “the locals here believe in conspiracy theories.”
Many have come to believe that the Kyrgyz government and foreign agencies are exaggerating the threat of an environmental catastrophe, so that public servants and consultants can line their pockets with EU money.
“Anything that involves large sums of money makes [the locals] assume that corruption is at play,” Travkina said.
Another reason for the scepticism, Travkina and Koychiev believe, is sheer practicality: despite Mailuu-Suu’s comparative prosperity, many of its adults are among the 500,000 Kyrgyz migrants who seek work in Russia every year.
Ultimately, “everyone is busy trying to make a living as migrants in Russia, building houses for their families,” Koychiev explained.
“People would rather not think about it, make believe everything will be fine for ever.”
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, I visited the village of Sary-Bee, the closest settlement to the tailings ponds.
Lining the unpaved road are half-empty three-storey wooden homes built by German prisoners-of-war (locals refer to them as “Finnish houses” because of their Nordic design).
At weekends, men gather behind a school in the centre of the village to play five-a-side football on an artificial-turf pitch.
Abdlla Akmatov, a quiet and doe-eyed 38-year-old father of three, stood in goal, enjoying his day off work.
Although born and raised in the village, Akmatov spent several years working in the construction industry across Russia to support his growing family.
In 2020, once he felt he had made enough money abroad, he bought a modest apartment in one of the Sary-Bee’s Soviet-era housing blocks.
(His family had to abandon their original home because it was on an active landslide.
“Every year it would move five to six centimetres,” he explained.)
Today, more than half of the apartments in the housing estate remain vacant: the intermittent water supply and lack of central heating scares off potential buyers more than the proximity to nuclear waste.
Home sweet home Sary-Bee’s distinctive wooden houses (top) were built during the second world war by German prisoners-of-war. Abdlla Akmatov (middle) moved back to Sary-Bee after several years of migrant work and now has a job at a lightbulb factoryAfter the game, I joined Akmatov at his apartment, where we sipped on lemon iced tea and ate freshly homemade bread.
While playing with his youngest son, two-year-old Yryskeldi, in the living room, Akmatov recalled how lonely he felt in Russia, living away from his family for months at a time in shared temporary housing.
He and his wife now work at Mailuu-Suu’s state-owned lightbulb factory – the town’s largest employer, and one of the few alternatives to working abroad.
They earn between 28,000 and 40,000 som ($315-450) each per month, a good salary by local standards.
(Akmatov also makes leather bridles adorned with traditional Kyrgyz silver ornaments for extra cash.)
He is grateful for these opportunities.
Yet he has a growing sense of unease about the collapsing tailings ponds nearby
He is grateful for these opportunities.
Yet he has a growing sense of unease about the collapsing tailings ponds nearby.
Like many in the village, Akmatov used to dismiss the idea that the waste could contaminate anything.
But after attending a meeting led by local health officials and the German engineers, he realised that he had underestimated the dangers; the environmental destruction the scientists described seemed terrifying.
He also began thinking about the health risks in a new light.
“Everyone in my family is in good health, but I believe that the uranium definitely has a negative impact,” he told me.
“A friend of mine lives in a house built from bricks taken from the site of the demolished uranium processing, and his family has serious health issues.”
Despite this, Akmatov remained wary of the ongoing efforts to secure funding for the clean-up, remembering how negligent previous works had been.
“Dirty dump trucks speeding up and down without getting properly washed; drivers stopping to grab a soda at the village shop in their contaminated work boots, kicking up uranium dust all over the place.
There was no proper oversight,” he complained.
(Wagner, the G.E.O.S. scientist, assured me that the organisation has “a robust system in place to prevent contamination”.)
Danger zone The outskirts of Mailuu-Suu (top) suffered after a mudslide earlier this year. Another such disaster could destabilise the tailings ponds (bottom), flooding the area with nearly 1m cubic metres of radioactive wasteUltimately, though, Akmatov understood he had little control over what would happen next.
“This is home, I have nowhere else to go.
If they need to move the waste – so be it.
As long as they do it properly, I’m not against it.”
In the morning, I woke up to the news that Mailuu-Suu had been temporarily cut off from the rest of Kyrgyzstan after a powerful mudslide tore through the suburb of Kök-Tash, 9km south of the town centre.
There were no casualties, but there was extensive property damage – the mud knocked down brick walls, flooded basements and destroyed gardens.
As details of the disaster spread on local WhatsApp groups, men arrived in Kök-Tash with shovels, food and water to assist the residents.
One helper was Altyn Nurbayev, a broad-shouldered 28-year-old who had recently returned to the area after several years of working as a sous-chef at a restaurant in Moscow.
Growing up in Mailuu-Suu, Nurbayev had never thought much about the tailings ponds.
In fact, he had wanted to move back from Russia precisely because he thought the town’s “access to pristine nature” would make it a better place to raise his two children.
But his wife, who is originally from Osh, had doubts: “When she moved to Mailuu-Suu she could smell the uranium.
At first, she had terrible migraines and heart palpitations, but then her body got used to the place.”
(This is a common complaint in Mailuu-Suu, though it has no basis in science.
As Mаmbеtov, the town’s public-health head, explained, “Uranium is odourless, so what they’re actually smelling in the air is naturally occurring sulphur.”)
Treading carefully on a mud-covered footbridge across the debris-filled river, we saw streams of mud, rocks and uprooted trees drying in the midday heat.
As bulldozers and emergency vehicles passed us on the road, Nurbayev stopped to look at a wooden house with a mound of rocks piled up under the windows and thick trails of mud under the front door.
He laughed nervously.
“Imagine if the mudslide had occurred up the road where the uranium tailings are buried.
Brother, we’d be so screwed.”
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