SEMEI, Kazakhstan — Hundreds of thousands of people in northeastern Kazakhstan are still suffering the consequences from 40 years of nuclear-weapons tests that were conducted near their homes during the Soviet era.
RFE/RL: Victims of Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era nuclear tests feel ‘abandoned’
An electronic device shows that the soil near a crater formed by nuclear explosion site P-1 has an exposure rate that exceeds 255 micro X-ray/h, in Semipalatinsk, some 50km from Kurchatov-city and 700 km from Astana, on August 22, 2011. A total of 456 nuclear tests were conducted at the test site over 42 years until Kazakhstan shut down the facility twenty years ago on August 29, 1991, making it the first country to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons. The provincial and otherwise unremarkable town of Semey, known as Semipalatinsk until four years ago, lies 150 kilometres (93 miles) west of the 18,400 square kilometre (7,100 square mile) nuclear testing site where the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States began.
