It once was a proud and prosperous part of the Soviet Union’s robust uranium-mining industry. But today, residents of northern Kazakhstan’s Saumalkol call their home a ghost town.
Forty years of Soviet nuclear bomb tests have left a toxic wasteland in Kazakhstan. The nuclear explosions have stopped, but Russia still rents vast swathes of Kazakh territory for missile tests that critics say are devastating for the environment and its inhabitants. Filmmaker: Harutyun Mansuryan. Wasteland first aired on Current Time TV's Crossroads program in March 2019.
When the proposed Chigirinsky Nuclear Power Plant was canceled in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, the Ukrainian town of Orbita was left to molder away.
