On September 3, 2026, on the shores of the Pacific, Kazakhstan took its decisive step toward nuclear energy. Rosatom and Kazakhstan Nuclear Power Plants — the state-owned company established to oversee the country’s atomic energy projects — signed the main contract for the construction of the Balkhash nuclear power plant in Vladivostok, on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum. The agreement was signed by Alexey Likhachev, Director General of Rosatom, and Almasadam Satkaliyev, Chairman of Kazakhstan’s Atomic Energy Agency.
The plant will be built near the village of Ulken, on the western shore of Lake Balkhash, approximately 400 kilometres from Almaty. It will feature two Russian-designed VVER-1200 reactors, with a combined installed capacity of 2.4 gigawatts. The preliminary cost is estimated at around $16.4 billion, with the bulk of the financing expected to come in the form of a Russian state export loan. The contract covers design, equipment supply and construction of the plant, and also includes agreements for maintenance and fuel supply throughout the facility’s operational lifetime.
The roadmap is now set. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027, the year in which Rosatom must obtain the site licence. Satkaliyev has already identified 2034 as the target date for the first unit to come online, while the full construction cycle is expected to span roughly a decade. Kazakhstan’s national budget, in the three-year draft currently under discussion, already allocates more than 818 billion tenge — approximately $1.7 billion — to be disbursed in three tranches between 2027 and 2029 as capital contributions to Kazakhstan Nuclear Power Plants.
The road to this contract has been a long one. In the October 2024 referendum, more than 70% of the 7.8 million voters backed the construction of the plant. In June 2025, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, both sides approved an indicative roadmap. Rosatom had already been designated as the lead contractor of an international equipment supply consortium: in his statement yesterday, Likhachev confirmed that the consortium will be formally established in the coming months and that design work will get underway. The Vladivostok signing closes the political chapter and opens the technical one.
Kazakhstan is the world’s largest uranium producer, yet to date it has never generated a single kilowatt-hour of nuclear electricity. This contract marks a fundamental shift: the country is no longer merely a supplier of raw materials, but a nation with its own nuclear generation capacity. The government has set a target of a 5% nuclear share in the national electricity mix by 2035. China National Nuclear Corporation, meanwhile, is already expected to build a second plant in the same Zhambyl region, pointing Kazakhstan toward a profoundly transformed power system within the span of a decade. Today’s signing is the concrete starting point of that journey.
