Perhaps because its people understand firsthand the horrors of living with the effects of nuclear testing, Kazakhstan has fully supported efforts to ban nuclear testing and nuclear weaponry, and has given up its nuclear arsenal. 

Politics Clouds Efforts to Ban Nuclear Testing, By Elizabeth Whitman, UNITED NATIONS, Sep 5, 2011 (IPS) – On Aug. 29, 1949, the Soviet Union conducted the first of 456 nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk in Eastern Kazakhstan, at the site where it ultimately held over two-thirds of all Soviet nuclear tests without warning inhabitants of the region of the impact of exposure to these tests.On Aug. 29, 1991 the site closed, yet the devastating health and environmental effects continue to plague the region to this day.

With last week marking the 20th anniversary closure of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and the second International Day Against Nuclear Tests, world leaders and U.N. officials gathered to discuss the issue of nuclear testing.They convened in a high level workshop on Thursday and an informal meeting of the General Assembly on Friday.

In the wide array of views and concepts presented in these gatherings, however, consensus seemed clear on only one point: the fact that efforts to ban nuclear testing and indeed, to entirely eliminate nuclear weapons around the world, are clouded with political overtones and motives.

Meanwhile, states with nuclear weapons continue to depend upon those capabilities for strength and influence in areas of international security and relations, and politics overshadow the fact that nuclear testing poses serious hazards to human and environmental health and nuclear weapons have the ability to destroy the planet. …….
Perhaps because its people understand firsthand the horrors of living with the effects of nuclear testing, Kazakhstan has fully supported efforts to ban nuclear testing and nuclear weaponry, and has given up its nuclear arsenal. …..
Politics Clouds Efforts to Ban Nuclear Testing – IPS ipsnews.net

As for the locals, they were little more than guinea pigs…. it is so hard to prove the link between nuclear fallout and the diseases that may strike afterwards.According to Dr. Marat Sandybaev, head of the local oncology centre, cancer rates in the area are still twice as high as the national average, and it is estimated that birth defects are up to 10 times higher.

Bringing life to a nuclear wasteland Can a nuclear test site be reclaimed? The Soviets detonated hundreds of bombs in Kazakhstan, poisoning the land and people. Louise Gray of the Telegraph travels to the notorious Polygon site and reports on plans to restore the region By Louise Gray, The Telegraph September 4, 2011 “…. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union detonated more than 456 nuclear devices on the Semipalatinsk test site, better known as the “Polygon.”

This region of the Kazakh steppe, covering an area the size of Belgium, was the primary testing ground for the most sophisticated atomic weapons in the Soviet arsenal. Some 116 were exploded above ground, producing the “beautiful” mushroom clouds that witnesses remember; the rest were let off underground, protecting the atmosphere but leaching more poison into the earth.

As for the locals, they were little more than guinea pigs. In the state home for the elderly in Semipalatinsk – which has been renamed Semey since Kazakhstan independence in 1991 – old women gather to tell their stories. They too have injuries and illnesses, though only Makysh receives compensation, because it is so hard to prove the link between nuclear fallout and the diseases that may strike afterwards.

According to Dr. Marat Sandybaev, head of the local oncology centre, cancer rates in the area are still twice as high as the national average, and it is estimated that birth defects are up to 10 times higher.

What is unique about the Polygon, however, is not its past, but its present. While other testing sites around the world have been abandoned, the Kazakhs are attempting to detoxify the area. The National Nuclear Centre of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NNC) wants to open parts of the site for commercial exploitation within a year, and the whole mineral-rich area within a decade, except for “highly contaminated spots.” Decontamination would be carried out simply by scraping off the top five centimetres of soil – although that does leave the question of where to dump it…….

the Geiger counter is racing and so is my heart. My stomach is churning as radioactive dust rises, even though we are wearing gas masks and protective covers on our feet

The Soviets filled the area with apartments, bridges and roads, to resemble a town. Now, all that is left are burned lumps of concrete. The “biological objects” that were tied to posts, such as horses, cows and pigs (“because they have skin like humans”), are long gone. Our guides, dressed in camouflage gear and disarmingly casual, pick up rocks of melted soil wearing just surgical gloves. The Geiger counter is reading three microsieverts per hour, which is considerably more than you might expect of natural background radiation….

Bringing life to a nuclear wasteland

Heavily contaminated areas of the Semipalatinsk nuclear site are closed to access by Kazaks who used the land for farming and grazing. The government, with the United States, is working to keep dangerous materials out of sinister hands, said Erlan Idrissov, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the United States.

“All those years we have been trying to make a full assessment of the dangers that were brought to the land by nuclear testing,” he said Thursday. drissov spoke before joining a panel discussion at the Atomic Testing Museum to mark the 20th anniversary of the closure of the Semipalatinsk nuclear site.”The government’s task is to completely rehabilitate the area from the human health point of view and nature, the environmental health point of view,” he said……

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests that involved detonating 969 nuclear devices.

The United States conducted 1,054 nuclear tests, including 24 that were conducted with the United Kingdom. Most, 904, were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, which is now called the Nevada National Security Site. These included 100 detonated in the atmosphere and 804 underground. Some involved more than one device.

Soviet nuclear legacy surfaces at atomic museum – News – ReviewJournal.com

City that suffered most calls for an end to nuclear testing, Telegraph, By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent, Semipalatinsk, 29 Aug 2011

Between 1949 and 1989 this area of eastern Kazakhstan was used by the former Soviet Union to test 456 nuclear bombs. The local population was not told about the risks to their lives – or indeed the health of their grandchildren.

In the state home for the elderly old women recall the “beautiful” mushroom clouds.

Makysh Iskakova was just 19 when she saw a bright ball in the sky “the size of a yurt”, then a smell “like burning hair”. The 78-year-old in dark glasses says she only saw the nuclear bomb three times and then she was blinded for life.

Sitting beside her Nina Kolesnikova, 83, is covered in Soviet medals. She went out in bare feet to see the blast. “I felt the wave of the explosion and fell to the floor.” She says she has been crippled ever since.

In Semey state Children’s Home Dina Batyrova snuffles and squeaks as she tries to breathe. Her head is twice the size of a normal child’s, swollen with water on the brain or hydrocephalus.

Next door other abandoned children with Down’s syndrome or other genetic defects play or sit listlessly in push chairs……

The trouble with the long term effects of nuclear fallout is it is difficult to prove a direct link with illness, says Dr Kazbek Abasalikov, the Director of the Institute of Radiation Medicine in Semey, meaning the affected of Chernobyl, Fukishima and Semey continue to live in fear.

He hopes to publish research within a year in an international peer-reviewed journal that shows once and for all the link between radiation and illness. The institute is also advising the Japanese over Fukishima.

In his opinion there is a link, the question is at what dosage does it become dangerous?

“The disease caused by radiation could skip a generation,” he adds.

Akmaral Musakhanova, Head of Research at the Semey University Medical Centre, is sure there is a link. She shows us monstrous pickled foetuses, including a ‘Cyclops baby’ with one eye and Siamese twins, collected from around Semey since 1953. She says that the rate of deformities is “at least” twice the normal rate.

Dr Marat Sandybaev, head of the local oncology centre, says cancer rates in the area are almost twice the national average.

He said there is “consensus” in the medical community about the link between] radiation and cancer.

“The wind blew soil to different places so they could be found all over the area and the half-life of some these materials is hundreds of years so yes, we could we will still continue to see the effects of the testing,” he says……

Kazakhstan’s Uranium Industry Could Lose Its Luster, By. John Daily,  OilPrice.com, 18 June 11-- What a difference a year and a tsunami make!

Western investors have been salivating over the post-Soviet space’s energy riches since the 1991 collapse of communism. While focusing on the Caspian’s hydrocarbon reserves other mineralogical riches awaited development as well, none more so than Kazakhstan’s vast uranium deposits.  Given an investor-friendly government in Astana, the country’s uranium deposits seemed to be the Next Big Thing, an attitude encouraged by the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Kazakhstan contains the world’s second-largest uranium reserves, estimated at 1.5 million tons. Until 2009 Kazakhstan was the world’s No. 3 uranium miner, exceeded only by Australia and Canada; the three countries account for more than half of global uranium production.

And that news may be coming from the United States, birthplace of the nuclear era and currently home to 104 NPPs. On 7 June, a fire at Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant knocked out the cooling process for spent nuclear fuel rods for 90 minutes. The NPP, adjacent to the still-flooding Missouri River, is close to the capital Omaha and has been closed since April for refueling. According to local NBC affiliate WOWT, “The Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Facility is an island right now but it is one that authorities say is going to stay dry. They say they have a number of redundant features to protect the facility from flood waters that include the aqua dam, earthen berms and sandbags.” A spokesman for Omaha Public Power District says the plant is at a “notification of unusual event” classification because of the flooding.

In an era of globalization, Ol’ Man River may drown Kazakhstan’s hopes for its uranium mining industry, as another nuclear debacle in the U.S. following in the wake 1979’s Three Mile Island accident will undoubtedly prove too much, even for Madison Ave.’s PR spin doctors. No NPPS have been built in the U.S. since Three Mile Island and should bad things happen at Ft. Calhoun, where the Missouri’s water’s are still rising, the global market for uranium fuel for NPPs worldwide is going to crater, beginning with the U.S.

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Kazakhstans-Uranium-Industry-Could-Lose-Its-Luster.html

In the largest such operation ever mounted, U.S. and Kazakh officials transferred 11 tons of highly enriched uranium and 3 tons of plutonium some 1,890 miles by rail and road across the Central Asian country………….

U.S., Kazakhstan complete secret transfer of nuclear materials, KansasCity.com,  By JONATHAN S. LANDAY, McClatchy Newspapers, 18 Nov 10, WASHINGTON – Working under extraordinary secrecy, the U.S. and Kazakh governments in the past year have moved nuclear material that could have been used to make more than 770 bombs from a location feared vulnerable to terrorist attack to a new high-security facility.

In the largest such operation ever mounted, U.S. and Kazakh officials transferred 11 tons of highly enriched uranium and 3 tons of plutonium some 1,890 miles by rail and road across the Central Asian country………….

The sparsely populated region where the storage facility is also is home to the defunct Semipalatinsk Test Site, a 7,000-square-mile expanse of steppe where the Soviet Union conducted more than 460 nuclear test explosions from 1949 to 1990 while Kazakhstan was a Soviet republic.

“The project is a very significant technical achievement,” D’Agostino said in an interview Nov. 8 that McClatchy Newspapers agreed to embargo until the operation was completed. “This isn’t stuff you just put on a truck and drive across a country.”

The United States spent $219 million on the project. Britain kicked in $4 million and Kazakhstan also contributed some funding, U.S. officials said.

“The cost is very, very small compared to the cost of the wrong people getting their hands” on the material, said a U.S. official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the project publicly……………

The U.S. officials declined to elaborate on the threat, citing classified intelligence.

Aktau, however, sits directly across the Caspian Sea from Russia’s Northern Caucasus region, where al-Qaida-linked Islamic separatists are engaged in insurgencies in the republics of Dagestan and Chechnya.

Iran, which Western officials accuse of pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program, also has a Caspian Sea coast. Tehran denies that it is seeking nuclear arms……….

Until Kazakhstan, the largest transfer operation returned nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium – enough for 18 bombs – to Russia from Poland, a project that was completed in September…..

U.S., Kazakhstan complete secret transfer of nuclear materials – KansasCity.com

But she was one of the lucky ones. Still vigorous and able to walk with aid of a cane, she was not afflicted with any of the horrific tumors or the radiation-caused genetic mutilations and birth defects that affected many residents of Semey and other settlements near the 7,000-square-mile test site known as the Polygon, Russian for “firing range.”

Her story, and those of thousands of others like her, is the reason why Kazakhstan, a Central Asia country unknown to most Americans, is standing front and center among the 47 nations represented at the two-day Global Nuclear Security Summit beginning Monday in Washington…….

[Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev]  was the first foreign leader to renounce the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Al Eisele: Why Kazakhstan Is Front and Center at the Global Nuclear Security Summit

Kazakhs accuse ex-uranium boss of money laundering

One of Kazakhstan’s most prominent business figures, Mukhtar Dzhakishev was arrested last year on accusations of corruption, theft and illegal sales of uranium assets to foreign companies…..

Kazakhstan, hit hard by global economic slowdown, wants to attract fresh foreign investment as well as bolster the role of the state in strategic industries such as uranium and oil.

It has also alarmed human rights groups who have questioned Kazakhstan’s methods of fighting corruption in a country where President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in power for two decades, tolerates little political dissent.http://www.miningweekly.com/article/kazakhs-accuse-ex-uranium-boss-of-money-laundering-2010-03-04

Russia to probe alleged Iran uranium deal with Kazakhstan

December 31, 2009 Washington,   (WashingtonTV)—Russia said on Thursday that it had no knowledge of an alleged uranium deal between Iran and Kazakhstan, but it will look into the allegations.The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Iran was close to clinching a deal to import 1,350 tons of purified uranium ore from Kazakhstan…..

……United Nations Security Council Resolution 1737 bans the shipment of any nuclear materials to Iran, including purified uranium ore………..

Russia to probe alleged Iran uranium deal with Kazakhstan – WashingtonTV تلویزیون واشنگتن

Kazakhstan to take former uranium boss to court over thef tKazakh prosecutors have filed a criminal court case against the former uranium boss Dzhakishev over corruption, they said World Bulletin 10 December 2009.………………Charges of illegally selling uranium deposits that had previously caused concerns among foreign investors have not been included in the case and will be investigated separately, the Kazakh Prosecutor General’s office said.

Kazakhstan to take former uranium boss to court over theft [ WORLD BULLETIN- TURKEY NEWS, WORLD NEWS ]