Uchkuduk

The city is located in the central part of the Kyzylkum desert , 12 km from the Uchkuduk railway station. Since 1958, the Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Combine (NMMC) has been operating in the city. Most residents are employees of this plant. Since 2001, the Uchkuduk-2 - Miskin railway line began to operate in Uzbekistan. Since 1995, a gold extraction complex has been operating in Uchkuduk, with a design capacity of about 20 tons of gold per year.

The history of the appearance of Uchkuduk is due to the fact that in the 1950s the USSR was in dire need of uranium . The ideas of geologists at that time were such that uranium deposits can only be in the mountains , so deposits were first discovered in the settlement area of Yangiabad of the Uzbek SSR , in the Kyrgyz SSR . As the development of geophysical equipment began to equip it and aviation .

Geophysical equipment was installed on a Li-2 aircraft, which was barraging over the Kyzylkum desert . Over the field, the equipment recorded a powerful burst of radiation, which was reported to Moscow . Same month ^{[ when? ]} an exploration expedition was urgently organized for a more detailed assessment of the field .

The expedition leadership decided to dig three wells that served: one for drinking, one for bathing, and the third for technical needs. So the name Uch-Kuduk (Three Wells) appeared. Further on this place appeared stationary geological party No. 54, which lasted until the mid-1960s. Then Uchkuduk became an urban-type settlement (since 1978 - a city ) and belonged to the Bukhara region . On April 20, 1982, from the parts of the Bukhara region, the Navoi region was formed, which included Uchkuduk.

Until 1979, it had the status of a closed secret strategic object . In the late 1960s, thanks to the rapid growth of uranium ore production by both open and underground methods, and subsequently by underground leaching , the city began to develop rapidly, and mass visits to the permanent work of miners and engineers from all over the USSR began .

Currently ^{[ specify ]} 28 thousand people live in Uchkuduk.

In Uchkuduk, there is the northern mining department of the Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Combine (NMMC), which is a city-forming enterprise. NMMC was established in 1958 for the extraction of uranium ore by open and underground mining on the basis of the Uchkuduksky deposit . Currently ^{[ specify ] the} main activities of the mine are:

• mining and processing of uranium by underground leaching ;
• mining and processing of gold-bearing ores of the Kokpatas deposit;
• sulfuric acid release;
• production of marble products based on the Novy mine (closed in 2003).

The city of Uchkuduk became widely known thanks to the song of the Yalla group Uchkuduk - Three Wells to the words of Yuri Entin .

In the vicinity of Uchkuduk there was a plane crash with the largest number of victims in the history of the USSR (200 people). On July 10, 1985, the Tu-154 passenger plane, flying along the Tashkent - Karshi - Ufa - Leningrad route, soon after taking off from the Karshi airport fell into a flat corkscrew and collided with the surface of the earth.

• Pechenkin I. G. On the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the Uchkuduk deposit // Rational development of mineral resources. 2012. No. 3. P. 66-69.

• Modern look from the site of the Navoi region
• Uchkuduk: yesterday, today and confident steps into the future. To the 45th anniversary of NMMC
• Gez T. Greetings from Uchkuduk // Time Plus, vol. No. 13, September 16-23, 2003
• Official site of Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Plant
• Uch-Kuduk group on artNEXX.ru
• Uchkuduk - uranium, song and plane crash