14 July 2008

NPR: Kyrgyz Town Lives with Radioactive Soviet Legacy

NPR has a lengthy and detailed story dated Feburary 5, 2008 by its Russian field agent Ivan Watson on the heaps of radioactive waste that the Soviet Union left in the town of Mailuu-Suu in Kyrgyzstan. Its residents "are accustomed to living next to radioactive waste. Some locals even joke that they need radiation to survive."

Who knows; perhaps the old stories of the 1950s about exposure to radiation producing horrible mutants that terrorize villages at night and eat babies will be true. More likely it will result in huge groundwater contamination and dozens of slow deaths by cancer.

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