A quiet village on the southern shore of Lake Balkhash is about to become one of Central Asia's more ambitious urban projects. Ulken, currently a small settlement in Kazakhstan's Zhambyl region, is set to be expanded into a full town of up to 33,000 residents, built from scratch around housing, schools, hospitals, vocational training centres, hotels and business space. The driving force: Kazakhstan's plan to build at least three nuclear power plants, with the first slated for the Lake Balkhash area.
Almasadam Satkaliyev, head of the country's Atomic Energy Agency, announced the plan on Nov. 12 while visiting Türkiye's Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, where Kazakh engineers are currently working. He was keen to stress that Ulken won't be a fenced-off camp for reactor builders — the idea is to grow the existing village into a proper town, with infrastructure built for construction later repurposed for residents. The agency also flagged ambitions to add digital services and develop tourism and recreation along the lakeshore.
The numbers behind the project are striking. A single plant construction peak would need up to 15,000 workers — welders, electricians, civil engineers, quality control specialists — and each finished plant would employ around 2,000 permanent staff. To staff this pipeline, Kazakhstan plans a training centre in Ulken, partnerships with universities in China and Russia, and dedicated slots on its Bolashak scholarship for nuclear studies abroad. Kazakh citizens already working at Akkuyu are being encouraged to bring that experience home.
The Akkuyu visit itself offered a preview of what's coming. The first of four Russian-built VVER-1200 reactors there has passed hydraulic testing and is close to commissioning, with units two, three and four at progressively earlier stages. Kazakhstan is lining up international partners of its own — Russia, China, Hungary and South Korea — as the Balkhash plans firm up.
Why should a traveller care? Lake Balkhash is one of the world's most unusual lakes: a vast, half-freshwater, half-salty basin in southeastern Kazakhstan that remains firmly off the mainstream tourist trail. New towns bring hotels, transport links and services, and officials have explicitly named tourism as part of Ulken's future. If even a fraction of that materialises, this could open up a genuinely remote corner of Kazakhstan to visitors — though anyone heading there now should expect a frontier-style trip rather than a resort experience.
For now, treat this as a story to watch: a lakeside hamlet on the edge of one of Asia's great inland seas, earmarked to become a city of 33,000.
