Unlike many other newly emerging oil-rich nations, Kazakhstan is not placing all its hopes on its hydrocarbon resources but seeking to diversify its energy exports to include uranium, adducing an increased demand for the fuel in coming decades from countries interested in nuclear power. Ultimately, however, having the silvery metal underwrite an increased percentage of the national economy might well prove to be a mixed blessing. In a world increasingly conscious of greenhouse gases and global warming, nuclear power has great appeal, but 55 years after the world's first nuclear power plant became operational, no one has yet figured out how to safely dispose of the waste.

The global recession is not sparing energy exporters, including more recent producing nations, as oil tumbles from its record high of $147.27 last July to $42.63 on March 4, with some analysts predicting a further fall to around $37 a barrel. The dramatic price decline has played havoc with the projected budgets of all producing nations. Kazakhstan -- which, since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, created an oil-export industry that last year averaged 1.54 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration -- has scrambled to readjust to depressed energy prices in the new global economy.

In 2008 the growth of Kazakhstan's economy, fueled by more than $40 billion in foreign investment, slowed to 5 percent as declining oil prices and a softening world economy began to have an impact, while inflation reached 18 percent. On Feb 4, the Kazakhstan National Bank devalued the tenge by 18 percent, but the Kazakh government has been much more interventionist than its more timid Western counterparts, actively shoring up its banks. Furthermore, the current depressed price of oil does not have the potential negative impact of sites with higher production costs, such as deepwater platforms. Last week, during an international conference held at Kazakh-British Technical University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Professor Jeann Ahmetbekova told her audience that the cost of Kazakh oil production averages $2 per barrel, putting it nearly on par with Saudi Arabia.

What the global downturn has done in Kazakhstan is put a brake on many projects, even as the government has vowed to protect the country's social services.

On Feb. 23 Minister for Energy and Mineral Resources Sauat Mynbayev announced to the Mazhilis, one of the country's two parliamentary chambers, that Kazakhstan intended to boost uranium production by 40 percent in 2009 to 11,900 tons -- compared with 8,512 tons last year -- and to rise in 2010 to 15,400 tons annually. Helping to fuel the increase, two new mines, Khorasan-1 and Khorasan-2, are to begin operations later this year to facilitate the planned boost in production.

Kazakhstan is still struggling with its Soviet-era nuclear legacy -- the Semipalatinsk Polygon nuclear test site in the east of the country. At 6,949 square miles, an area larger than Connecticut, Semipalatinsk was the world's largest nuclear test facility. From 1949 until the site was shuttered in 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests, including 340 underground and 116 atmospheric tests.

"The cumulative power of those explosions, both aboveground, on the ground and underground, is believed to equal 2,500 Hiroshima bombs," according to the country's embassy Web site, kazakhembus.com. The Kazakh Environment Ministry reported that direct fallout from Semipalatinsk was estimated to cover 117,000 square miles. Besides the wind-borne fallout, recent Russian research documenting Soviet nuclear testing reported that about half the underground tests at Semipalatinsk resulted in a release of radioactivity.

In a gesture that was typical of the Soviet system, the leadership did not evacuate local villages when testing began. In the 1960s scientists in Semipalatinsk's deceptively named Anti-Brucellosis Dispensary No. Four -- in reality a research center on radiation-induced illnesses operated in secret by the third department of the Soviet Health Ministry -- noted that Semipalatinsk residents were suffering abnormally high rates of cancer, liver and lung disease, skin disorders, headaches and sickness due to exposure to radioactive fallout.

In 1992 the Kazakh government turned the facility into the Kazakh National Nuclear Center and passed legislation providing benefits to people who suffered as a result of nuclear testing, but the scale of the problem is enormous: More than a million people, one in 16 Kazakhs, live near the former test site.

Acknowledging the ongoing scale of the pollution, last September the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization began a series of trials, the 2008 Integrated Field Exercise, at Semipalatinsk to calibrate its equipment that can identify and give the location of nuclear explosions, such as checking radiation levels in the soil and atmosphere, to be deployed at its 337 International Monitoring System facilities worldwide.

Meanwhile, the human damage inflicted by the tests continues two decades after the facility was closed. While Semipalatinsk's radiation levels have declined over time, experts warn that constant exposure to even low doses can create genetic malformations, which anatomy students at the Government Semipalatinsk State Medical University can see firsthand by visiting the institution's wrenching collection of deformed human fetuses collected from Semipalatinsk maternity hospitals. Local doctors report that half the local people they studied were found to be suffering from what they call "Semipalatinsk AIDS," a disease characterized by a "drastic weakening of the immune system."

Soon after it became independent, Kazakhstan became the first state to voluntarily renounce nuclear weapons, a significant gesture since after the disintegration of the Soviet Union it possessed the world's fourth-largest nuclear arsenal. A bulletin issued last September by the Kazakh Embassy in Washington noted, "Our nation has been an active player in the wide international efforts to promote nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation." Capping nearly a decade of talks, on Sept. 8, 2006, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan signed a treaty creating a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Central Asia, but the United States, Britain and France refused to attend the signing ceremony.

The site chosen for the ceremony? Semipalatinsk.

Kazakhstan is unique for the severity and extent of human suffering from prolonged exposure to nuclear radioactivity inflicted on its hapless citizens by the Soviet leadership. In May Radio Free Europe reported that nearly 10 percent of Kazakh citizens are suffering the aftereffects of the Soviet nuclear bomb tests at Semipalatinsk. While in the current global recession, expanding its uranium industry seems an insurance policy against volatile oil prices, the fact remains that uranium surface mines can generate up to 40 tons of radioactive waste tailings for every ton of uranium ore produced. Accordingly, Kazakhstan's goal of mining 11,900 tons of uranium would generate 476,000 tons of tailings ever year.

The scale of radioactive pollution looms large; more than 550,000 curies of plutonium alone are estimated to remain in Semipalatinsk's soil, for example, an amount hundreds of times greater than that released at Chernobyl, which has yet to be cleaned up.

In such a setting, quick cash received for whetting the world's growing appetite for nuclear energy may in the long run represent only a down payment on the funds needed to clean up 500,000 tons of low-radioactive waste added each year to the environment, much less Semipalatinsk.

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