Kazakhstan's Scary Uranium Ambitions

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Rensselaer Lee, an expert on nuclear security from U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, agreed. "Kazakhstan is a stable country now, and for the foreseeable future I see no major threat associated with Kazakhstan's acquisition of some nuclear power technology."

That technology includes new reactors, which Dzhakishev says are much safer than their predecessors. He said they would shut down automatically in the event of a terrorist attack, citing the example of the ill-fated Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in 2000 when a torpedo went off inside it.

"No one turned the reactor off. It shut down itself automatically without any radiation leakage," Dzhakishev said.

But the worries don't stop there, especially given that a Kyrgyz train could travel through Kazakhstan undetected with radioactive material on board.

In a 2007 report, Togzhan Kassenova, a fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, wrote, "Among the Central Asian states, Kazakhstan has the most developed export control system and is the only state to belong to one of the international export control regimes (the Nuclear Suppliers Group). However, even in Kazakhstan there is still considerable room for improvement."

Lee, of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the region's economic growth and the introduction of modern safeguards have substantially crimped the nuclear smuggling trade. In the former Soviet Union, he said, "There were 16 recorded smuggling incidents of such material between 1992 and 1999, compared to two from 2000 to now."

According to Dzhakishev, Kazakhstan's uranium mines pose little threat. "Even if uranium is stolen in the mines and smuggled across the border, it couldn't be used for making a dirty bomb because it has a very low level of radiation," he said.

Yuriy Vasilyev, from Kazakhstan's Institute of Nuclear Energy, said, "A dirty bomb requires a much higher enrichment, above 20 percent, and this is impossible to achieve without special equipment," which Kazakhstan does not have.

But the country's plans to build new-generation reactors could make it easier. The recycled fuel that they can use is plutonium that has been extracted from spent fuel, explained Antony Froggatt, a nuclear specialist at the London-based think tank Chatham House. "This has significant proliferation implications, as it is much easier to make a bomb out of plutonium fuel," Froggatt said.

Aside from smuggling, Kassenova said there is a danger that corruption in Kazakhstan could lead to overlooked security measures. But she added that Kazatomprom's status as a monopoly could mitigate such risks because organizational lapses would be relatively easy to trace.

Kazakhstan has made major efforts to stem proliferation in its neighborhood. After gaining independence, the government transferred all of the roughly 1,400 Soviet-era warheads that remained on its territory to Russia for decommissioning. It is a signatory to global treaties against nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism as well as a member of the IAEA.

In addition, Kazakhstan, which hosted the primary Soviet nuclear testing site, has banned such activity on its territory, and in 2006 it blended down 2,900 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, "enough to produce two dozen atomic bombs," into nuclear fuel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported.

Despite all these efforts, though, some will continue to look on Kazakhstan's new project with anxiety. For when it comes to nuclear material, the whole world can be at stake, not just Kazakhstan.

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