Air pollution
Industrial pollution is a bigger concern in Kazakstan's manufacturing cities, where aging factories pump huge quantities of unfiltered pollutants into the air and groundwater. The capital, Almaty, is particularly threatened, in part because of the postindependence boom in private automobile ownership.
The gravest environmental threat to Kazakstan comes from radiation, especially in the Semey (Semipalatinsk) region of the northeast, where the Soviet Union tested almost 500 nuclear weapons, 116 of them above ground. Often, such tests were conducted without evacuating or even alerting the local population. Although nuclear testing was halted in 1990, radiation poisoning, birth defects, severe anemia, and leukemia are very common in the area (see Health Conditions, this ch.).
With some conspicuous exceptions, lip service has been the primary official response to Kazakstan's ecological problems. In February 1989, opposition to Soviet nuclear testing and its ill effects in Kazakstan led to the creation of one of the republic's largest and most influential grass-roots movements, Nevada-Semipalatinsk, which was founded by Kazak poet and public figure Olzhas Suleymenov.. After a year of demonstrations and protests, the test ban took effect in 1990. It remained in force in 1996, although in 1995 at least one unexploded device reportedly was still in position near Semey.Once its major ecological objective was achieved, Nevada-Semipalatinsk made various attempts to broaden into a more general political movement; it has not pursued a broad ecological or "green" agenda. A very small green party, Tagibat, made common cause with the political opposition in the parliament of 1994.
Kazakhstan also faces the problem of urban pollution, particularly in its eastern cities, which receive harmful emissions from lead and zinc smelters, a uranium-processing mill, and other industries. In recent years, environmental activist groups in Kazakhstan have begun lobbying for tighter emission controls. Other environmental issues in Kazakhstan include soil pollution from the overuse of pesticides in agriculture and the increasingly polluted waters of the Caspian Sea.
The environment of Kazakhstan began to suffer serious harm during the Soviet period. The country now faces an urgent need to address the Soviet legacy of ecological mismanagement. Between 1949 and 1991 the Soviet government conducted about 70 percent of all of its nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, mostly in the north-eastern area near the city of Semipalatinsk (now Semey). Nearly 500 nuclear explosions occurred both above and below ground near Semipalatinsk, while more than 40 nuclear detonations occurred at other testing grounds in western Kazakhstan and in the Qyzylqum desert. More than 1 million of Kazakhstan’s inhabitants were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation because the Soviet government did not evacuate or even warn nearby populations. In the late 1980s Kazakhs held large demonstrations calling for an end to the nuclear testing, and in 1991 the government of Kazakhstan put a stop to the practice. However, the testing grounds, and perhaps even underground aquifers (water-bearing layers of rock, sand, or gravel), remain highly contaminated. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk Organization, which led the campaign against nuclear testing during the 1980s, has turned its attention to teaching residents of polluted areas how to avoid nuclear contamination. One of every three children born in the Semipalatinsk region has mental or physical defects, and about half the population suffers from immune system deficiencies.