BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 3. Kazakhstan is gearing up to shell out a pretty penny for a nationwide vote on constructing a nuclear power plant, Secretary of the Central Election Commission (CEC), Sabila Mustafina, shared the details of the above topic during a recent commission meeting, Trend reports.
The CEC spilled the beans that the ballpark figure for putting together the referendum will be around 15.5 billion tenge (about $32.1 million).
“In accordance with Article 28 of the Constitutional Law, the CEC develops and submits a preliminary budget to the government.
The President's announcement of the referendum timeframe prompted us to prepare and quantify the overall expenses, which we estimate at 15.5 billion tenge,” Mustafina said.
The referendum will be held across Kazakhstan with 10,327 voting stations nationwide and an additional 78 stations in 63 countries around the world. The timeline for the referendum process is as follows:
September 2: Decree on the referendum issued
September 12: Publication of territorial and precinct commission compositions, and referendum site details
September 15: Presentation of voter lists
September 16-26: Public information campaign about referendum timing and locations
October 3-5: Ballot distribution
October 5: Day of Silence
October 6 from 7:00 to 20:00: Voting
October 7-8: Vote counting and regional results
October 7-12: Publication of final results in the media
On September 1, 2023, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced that a referendum would be held regarding the construction of Kazakhstan’s first nuclear power plant.
Subsequently, the country listed companies competing to supply technology for the plant, including China's CNNC with the HPR-1000 reactor, South Korea’s KHNP with the APR-1400 reactor, France’s EDF with the EPR-1200 reactor, and Russia’s Rosatom with the VVER-1200 and VVER-1000 reactors.