UST-KAMENOGORSK (Kazakhstan): Scientists at a secret ex-Soviet nuclear weapons plant who once churned out weapons-grade uranium for submarines now enlist Cold War foe Washington’s help to keep their know-how from falling into terrorist hands.

In another symbol of post-September 11 partnership, Kazakhstan is working on a project to redirect the talents of experts at a former nuclear weapons plant to commercial and peaceful ends.

Kazakhstan and the United States announced in January that they had reached an agreement to help Ulba Metallurgical Plant, in the east of the country, develop its capability to make materials for nuclear power facilities.

“The plant used to make many products for the military industrial complex and so this help with our transition to civilian production is very useful,” said a senior research engineer at the plant, Aleksandr Gagarin.

Once known simply as Mailbox 10, the sprawling plant outside Ust-Kamenogorsk formed part of a vast array of infrastructure dedicated to the development of nuclear weapons which Kazakhstan inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed.

But Kazakhstan opted to become a non-nuclear state after it gained independence in 1991 and has dismantled and removed all nuclear weapons from its territory and destroyed the associated infrastructure.

US experts worked with the Central Asian state in a one-off project in 1994 to remove more than half a ton of highly enriched uranium from the Ulba plant, which some experts estimate was sufficient to make 20-25 nuclear bombs.

In January this year US officials announced “an ambitious nuclear non-proliferation effort” with Kazakhstan, which aims to help scientists re-direct their experience toward commercial production for peaceful purposes.

The plant outside Ust-Kamenogorsk is developing its capability to separate low-enriched uranium from uranium concentrates with help from two private US companies and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The uranium will then be made available as a power source to civilian power reactors throughout the world.

The project has already created jobs for 100 workers, some 80 per cent of whom previously worked at the plant, said UMP director general Vitaly Khadeyev.

During the early 1980s an estimated 13,000 people worked at Ulba Metallurgical Plant, which stretches across some 650 square hectares of land on the outskirts of this industrial mining town.

Dotted around the city are reminders of the key role that the factory played as residents stroll through Metallurgist Park past Metallurgist House down Potanin street, which was named after a former UMP director.—AFP