Kazakhstan Must Develop Nuclear Energy Sector – Paper

Text of report by Kazakh newspaper Izvestiya-Kazakhstan on 27 December

The Kazakh Energy and Mineral Resources Minister, Vladimir Shkolnik, is convinced that, Kazakhstan will, sooner or later, follow the whole world and realize the necessity of developing nuclear energy and that there will be no alternative to nuclear power plants in future. He shared his vision of this issue after a ceremony held to open the National centre for controlling the country’s unified electric energy system in Astana at the end of the past week.

“The whole world will acknowledge the necessity of developing nuclear energy, regardless of whether we want it or not,” the minister said. Our country, which possesses the largest uranium deposits in the world, technologies for producing fuel for the nuclear power plants and the most up-to-date uranium extraction technologies and which has more than a 30-year experience in operating various nuclear power plants and corresponding base and cadres, should simply develop its nuclear energy [sector].

The main obstacle to the nuclear energy development is the problem of choosing a reactor for a Kazakh nuclear plant, Vladimir Shkolnik believes. Although, the Kazakh society’s negative attitude towards the idea of constructing a nuclear power plant has so far been a stumbling block. We recall that the country’s government made public its plans about constructing a nuclear power plant near Lake Balkhash as far back as in 1998. According to specialists’ calculations, if the construction had started at that time, the first block of the power plant would have already started working this year and the plant would have been fully operational in 2015 at the minimum. However, many well-known representatives of the Kazakh society were against constructing the nuclear power plant at that time, and the issue has not been considered from a practical angle since then.

The minister’s shifting the emphasis from the Kazakh people’s attitude towards the idea of constructing a nuclear plant to technical nuances, such as the problem of selecting a certain type of reactor, bears witness to the fact that this idea is being supported “from above”. Without speaking openly about the fact that the project has in fact been approved, the minister recalled that the government had approved a nuclear industry and energy development programme, and also a programme of nuclear technologies development in Kurchatov [eastern Kazakhstan]. “Projects for choosing a type of nuclear plant will be worked out as part of these programmes,” the minister said.