Talk by Nikolaos Olma: Situating Uranium Industrialism: Uranium Mining and Epistemic Injustice in Soviet-Era Mailuu-Suu
When? – April 8, 2025 at 10:00am
Situating Uranium Industrialism: Uranium Mining and Epistemic Injustice in Soviet-Era Mailuu-Suu
Nikolaos Olma (University of the Aegean)
From the early 1940s until the mid-1960s, state-sanctioned industrial uranium mining on both sides of the Iron Curtain exhibited similar patterns of control over scientific knowledge and exploitation of peripheral lands and marginalised bodies. This makes it possible to conceptualise “uranium industrialism” as a global temporal and analytical category distinct from other aspects of uranium-fuelled nuclear modernity. Drawing on a combination of archival materials, published memoirs, and oral history interviews, this talk will situate uranium industrialism by tracing the GULAG-to-socialist-utopia life cycle of Mailuu-Suu, a Soviet uranium mining town located in the southern Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1945 and 1968, Mailuu-Suu was home to a uranium mining and hydrometallurgical combine that produced 10,000 tonnes of yellowcake—a partially refined form of uranium used in fuel preparation for nuclear reactors and as an intermediate step in nuclear weapons production. The closure of the combine marked the town’s transformation into an industrial centre, but this so-called “industrial conversion” was accompanied by the silencing of its uranium legacy and the rewriting of its history. The talk will highlight the crucial role of Mailuu-Suu’s mines in sustaining the Soviet atomic programme at a time when known uranium reserves in the Soviet Union were scarce. It will also point out how knowledge about radiation was withheld from miners and other workers, shedding light on the social, racial, epistemic, and environmental injustices that characterised the Soviet variant of “uranium industrialism” during and immediately after WWII.