The Man Who Counted the Mines: Kazakhstan's Uranium Workers Face an Invisible Reckoning

On a Tuesday morning in February 2026, Serik Ospanov was sitting in a plastic chair in the hallway of the Shymkent Regional Hospital, holding a manila folder that contained the medical records of 847 people, most of them dead. He had been collecting these documents for eleven years. The oldest record dated to 1978; the newest was from the previous month. Each one told a version of the same story: men and women who had worked in the uranium mines of Soviet Kazakhstan, who had raised children in towns built on contaminated soil, and who had died of cancers that no one had officially connected to their exposure.

Ospanov, sixty-three, was once a government geologist. He had spent his career mapping mineral deposits for the Kazakh state. Now he was mapping something else entirely: the paper trail of a public health catastrophe that three successive governments—Soviet, post-Soviet, and the current administration of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev—had declined to fully acknowledge.

"They told us the water was safe," Ospanov said, adjusting his glasses. "They told us for forty years."

What the Ground Remembers

Kazakhstan produces more uranium than any other country on Earth—roughly forty percent of global supply. The yellow ore extracted from its steppes powers nuclear reactors from France to South Korea. But the industry's modern success rests on a Soviet foundation that was never designed with human safety in mind.

Between 1949 and 1991, the Soviet Union operated more than fifty uranium extraction sites across what is now southern Kazakhstan. Many of these operations used a technique called in-situ leaching, which involves pumping sulfuric acid into underground deposits to dissolve uranium ore, then extracting the resulting solution through wells. It was efficient. It was also, according to documents Ospanov has obtained from Soviet-era archives, conducted with minimal containment protocols.

The town where Ospanov grew up, Stepnogorsk, was built in 1959 as a closed nuclear city—its existence classified, its residents forbidden from leaving without permission. His father worked in the processing facility. His mother taught mathematics at the local school. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, both had been diagnosed with thyroid abnormalities. His father died of bladder cancer in 1994. His mother followed in 2003, from leukemia.

"When I started looking at the records," Ospanov told me, "I found that almost every family in our neighbourhood had the same story. The same diseases. The same ages of death."

The Pattern in the Files

Ospanov began his documentation project in 2015, after Kazakhstan's government announced a partnership with the IAEA to remediate abandoned uranium sites. He had expected the program to include health monitoring for former workers and their families. It did not. The focus was on environmental cleanup—sealing mine shafts, treating groundwater—not on tracking the human consequences of decades of exposure.

Ospanov's method is painstaking. He travels to the former mining towns—Stepnogorsk, Aktau, Ust-Kamenogorsk—and knocks on doors. He asks families if they have kept medical records. Many have. Soviet citizens were meticulous documenters; they kept every certificate, every diagnosis, every prescription, in case the state ever required proof of something. These folders, stored in closets and filing cabinets across the Kazakh steppe, constitute an unofficial archive of radiation exposure.

He has digitized more than 2,400 records. Of the 847 individuals in the folder he carried to the hospital that Tuesday, 612 had died of cancers affecting the bladder, kidney, lung, or thyroid—organs known to be particularly vulnerable to radiation. The average age of death was fifty-eight.

The State's Silence

The Kazakh government's position on Soviet-era uranium exposure has been consistent: the past cannot be undone, and the present is being managed responsibly. Kazatomprom, the state-owned uranium company that now dominates global production, has invested heavily in modern safety protocols. Its annual reports emphasize dose monitoring, protective equipment, and regulatory compliance.

But Ospanov's archive suggests that the transition from Soviet to modern practices was not as clean as official narratives imply. He has obtained internal memoranda from the 1990s—the chaotic decade after independence—showing that many facilities continued operating without updated safety measures. Budget constraints and the collapse of regulatory institutions meant that workers in some mines received no dosimetry badges until 2003.

When I contacted the Kazakh Ministry of Energy for comment on Ospanov's findings, a spokesperson said the government "takes the health and safety of all workers seriously" and pointed to the ongoing IAEA remediation program. Asked specifically about health monitoring for former Soviet-era workers, the spokesperson said that "historical matters are outside the scope of current policy."

The Families Who Remain

In Stepnogorsk, the apartment blocks built for uranium workers still stand. The processing facility was decommissioned in 1991, but the town did not empty. People stayed because they had nowhere else to go, because the state provided pensions, because this was home.

Aizhan Nurmukhanova, seventy-one, lives in the same building where her husband worked as a shift supervisor until his death from kidney cancer in 2008. She has three children; two of them have been treated for thyroid disorders. Her grandson, born in 2015, has a congenital heart defect. She does not know if these conditions are connected to radiation exposure. No one has ever told her.

"I gave my husband's records to Serik," she said, referring to Ospanov. "I want someone to count us. I want someone to know we existed."

Ospanov's archive is not a lawsuit. He is not seeking compensation or demanding accountability in any formal sense. He is simply trying to create a record—something that will survive him, something that will make it harder for future governments to claim that no one knew.

Still Counting

The geopolitics of uranium have shifted since Ospanov began his work. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 disrupted global nuclear fuel supply chains. Western utilities, suddenly anxious about dependence on Russian enrichment services, began looking to Kazakhstan as an alternative supplier. Kazatomprom's stock price doubled. New extraction licenses were issued. Chinese investment flowed into pipeline projects connecting Kazakh mines to processing facilities in Xinjiang.

In this context, Ospanov's archive is an inconvenient reminder. It suggests that the cost of Kazakhstan's uranium wealth has never been fully tallied—that behind the production statistics and export figures are generations of workers who were never told what they were breathing, drinking, touching.

On that Tuesday in February, after four hours of waiting, Ospanov was finally seen by a hospital administrator. He had come to request access to death certificates for former uranium workers—public records, in theory, but difficult to obtain without official approval. The administrator, a woman in her forties who declined to give her name, listened to his explanation. Then she shook her head.

"These records are not available for research purposes," she said.

Ospanov nodded. He had heard this before. He placed the manila folder back in his bag, thanked her for her time, and walked out into the grey light of the Kazakh winter. He would try again next month. The count was not finished.