At a March 29 press conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, the Director of the Department of Electrical Power and Coal Industry of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources of Kazakhstan announced that, after years of debate, the government of Kazakhstan had made the decision to build a new nuclear power station. The facility, expected to be completed in 2015, would be the first built in Kazakhstan since it became independent in 1991. [1] The BN-350 nuclear power station at Aktau, constructed during the Soviet era, was the first nuclear power plant to operate in Kazakstan. That unit ceased operations in April 1999.

Yevgeni Ryaskov, Director of the Department of Technological Development in the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources explained at the press session that Kazakhstan needed gradually to reduce reliance on oil and coal, especially in the southern part of the country, which suffers from ecological damage resulting from coal-burning power stations. He also stressed that reserves of oil and gas are exhaustible and cannot serve as a reliable source of power in the long term, while hydroelectric power stations and wind stations can only serve as a backup source of power in the country. In the next 100 years, Ryaskov concluded, nuclear power is destined to become the main source of power for Kazakhstan. [2]

Kazakhstan has an extensive nuclear sector, which includes 20 percent of the world’s known uranium reserves; uranium mines and mills (for concentrating uranium ore); a facility for processing uranium into oxide form (for nuclear reactor fuel) and for sintering uranium oxide fuel pellets; and two research reactors. During the Soviet era, Russia’s principal nuclear weapon test site was in Kazakhstan, at Semipalatinsk. [3]

Debate in Kazakhstan over the construction of a nuclear power station has been on-going since 1998, with the country’s ecological organizations firmly opposing the project. Of particular concern is the fact that the site tentatively selected for the station is on Lake Balkhash in eastern Kazakhstan. The lake, much of which is very shallow, is thought to be slowly drying up, a development that is having a significant impact on the ecology of the area. [4] Given this situation, whether adequate supplies of water will be available for cooling operations at the reactor and/or whether use of this resource for this purpose might accelerate the lake’s decline are likely to be contentious issues.

The Kazakhstani government, however, appears to be firmly committed both to the proposal to construct the station and to the site apparently selected for the project. In late January 2006, Prime Minister of Kazakhstan Danial Akhmetov declared that delays with the project were slowing the economic and technological development of the country as a whole. [5]

Recent calls for the development of national nuclear energy programs have, in some cases, raised concerns about the proliferation risks of such activities because of the particular political and strategic contexts involved. [6] The construction of a nuclear power station by Kazakhstan, however, does not appear to raise such issues, given past actions by this country demonstrating its commitment to the renunciation of nuclear arms. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, Kazakhstan transferred to Russia all of the nuclear weapons remaining on Kazak territory and joined the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state. In addition, Kazakhstan voluntarily implemented a number of initiatives to eliminate weapons-usable nuclear materials within its borders. These have included the removal to the United States in 1994 of 600 kilograms of weapons-usable highly enriched uranium (HEU) and the down-blending in 2005 of nearly three metric tons of HEU to make it unusable for nuclear arms. [7]

Nikolai Sokov - Monterey Institute Center for Nonproliferation Studies