According to news reports, Kazakhstan plans to buy a major stake in Westinghouse.
(here for the AFP summary, and here for the Nikkei story).
According to the AFP report:
Kazakhstan is to pay 486.3 million dollars to buy a stake in US nuclear reactor firm Westinghouse from its majority owner Toshiba, news reports said Saturday. The Japanese giant will sign an agreement this month to sell a 10-percent stake in Westinghouse to state-run uranium firm Kazatomprom for slightly more than 60 billion yen, the Nikkei newspaper said ... Toshiba and Westinghouse are also expected to transfer uranium-processing technology to Kazatomprom, it said ... US government approval is required for transactions in which a foreign entity takes a stake in an American business possessing nuclear technology, the Nikkei said. US officials have indicated that the deal poses no problems.
Maybe someone should give government officials in the US a link to wikipedia's entry on Kazakhstan, and ask why this country should have so much nuclear technology.
If this report is true, it would seem to be a story about to explode on the Bush Administration's face.
Kazakhstan is an interesting place. When it became independent from the USSR, it reportedly controlled the 4th largest concentration of nuclear weapons in the world. In theory, all of these were returned to Russia.
There remains a good deal of interest and apparent confusion in the status of nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, such as this report from CNS.
One candidate who would know a lot of Kazakhstan and nuclear issues is Bill Richardson, who worked on efforts to remove nuclear weapon during his stint as Secretary of Energy under BIll Clinton.
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