After all the shouting, Kazakhstan nuclear referendum looks like a cakewalk
The authorities are pulling out all the stops to ensure that the vote goes their way.
There was little warning that Kazakhstan's referendum on building a nuclear power plant was about to be announced.
And yet, within 48 hours of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev setting the vote for October 6, the campaign in favour of the proposal was already in full swing.
The authorities' tactics to catch opponents of nuclear power off-guard highlight their determination to secure the desired outcome.
Speaking on September 4 at the inaugural meeting of the “yes” campaign, which has been dubbed the People’s HQ for the Construction of the Nuclear Power Plant, the leader of the ruling Amanat party, Yerlan Koshanov, borrowed heavily from the government’s script.
"The construction of a nuclear power plant will be a breakthrough project —a guarantee of Kazakhstan’s successful development for many years to come,” he said. “All the leading minds in our country — and the world — understand the benefits of using nuclear energy.”
All of Kazakhstan’s six permitted political parties and a group of 20 government-organised NGOs have been enlisted to the cause.
In spite of the scale of the push, officials are still evincing signs of nervousness that not everybody is on the same page.
This week, a court in Almaty fined an activist, Abzal Dostiyarov, for running a poll on his YouTube channel quizzing viewers on whether they favour nuclear power. Another citizen journalist, Samat Iskakov, was similarly punished by a court in Astana just for asking his followers on social media whether they intended to vote in the referendum.
Kazakh election laws strictly regulate which organisations are entitled to conduct opinion polls.
A survey of 1,200 people conducted by a government-affiliated think tank in August, before the referendum was announced, indicated that 53.1 percent of respondents supported the idea of building a nuclear power plant. Fully 32.5 percent were against. Uncomfortably for the authorities, however, 14.4 percent said they had not yet made up their mind.
This may account for the perceived need to speed-run the vote.
The coming three weeks will see local media resources, particularly those controlled by the government, inundated with do-or-die messaging.
One recurrent theme will be that Kazakhstan is looking down the barrel of a catastrophic shortage of electricity. According to current official forecasts, the country will be short 3 gigawatts of installed capacity by 2035 unless something dramatic changes. Soviet-vintage power production infrastructure is barely fit for purpose now, officials warn.
The campaign to sell the public on the need for nuclear power began in earnest in late 2023. Public consultations organised by the Energy Ministry took place across the entire country. As independent news outlet Vlast noted, however, the ministry pointedly refrained from inviting nuclear power opponents to the gatherings.
Another plank of the economic case for “yes” is that construction of a power plant will generate thousands of high-skilled jobs. Energy Minister Almasadam Satkaliyev argued last month that as many as 8,000 jobs would be created by the plant itself, and that each of those jobs could create up to 10 additional jobs in related sectors.
That will be music to the ears of residents of Ulken, the village on Lake Balkhash that has been earmarked as the construction site for the future power station.
Journalist and YouTuber Renat Tashkinbayev travelled to Ulken to produce a colourful report that dwelled on the air of despondency that has reigned there since the Soviet era. While some interviewees expressed some misgivings about the project, most appeared positive.
“I’m in favour, because that way there will be more people, [vacant] flats will fill up, there will be jobs. There are so many people here now who do not have jobs,” one young woman, a health worker, told Tashkinbayev.
Opponents of the power plant can only hope that Kazakhstan’s painful nuclear legacy — namely, the environmental and public health fallout of decades of weapons testing carried out by the Soviet military in the Semipalatinsk Polygon — is enough to make their argument for them.
Their under-resourced and outmanoeuvred campaign has so far been lacklustre. Some are already hoisting the white flag.
This week, a group of activists held a press conference to restate their concerns over safety and the environment dangers posed to Lake Balkhash by the plant. Aset Nauryzbayev, a former head of the state-owned Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company, disputed the government’s economic argument, saying that the large amount of money that will be spent on developing a nuclear power sector would be better invested on installing more solar and wind power capacity.
One speaker at the press event, Vadim Ni, an Almaty-based environmentalist, appeared resigned to his side losing the fight over the referendum.
“Even if the referendum doesn't go our way, supporters of building a nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan will have a long road ahead of them. We intend ultimately to defeat our opponents, because we cannot afford a Chernobyl or a Fukushima on Lake Balkhash,” he was quoted as saying by Vlast.