Kazakhstan backs plan for post-Soviet uranium giant

LONDON, June 30 (Reuters) Kazakhstan's state uranium mining company and energy minister on Friday backed a Russian proposal for a transnational uranium company on former Soviet territory, if it would mean access to Russian processing facilities.

''We are interested,'' Mukhtar Zhakishev, the head of Kazatomprom, the state owned uranium mining company, told an energy conference. ''It will happen, I believe, with in the next two years.'' Russian business media quoted the head of Russia's atomic energy agency as saying this week that uranium miners of the former Soviet Union, especially those in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, should unite under Russia's planned national uranium corporation.

Kazakhstan's energy minister Baktykozha Izmukhambetov said that in exchange for Russian access to Kazakh uranium deposits, Kazakhstan wanted access to Russia's uranium enrichment and conversion facilities.

''What they would invest in mining, we would want to invest in enrichment,'' Izmukhambetov told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.

Kazakhstan would also want Russia to invest in Kazakhstan's nuclear fuel fabrication facility, the Ulbinsky Metallurgical Plant, he said.

''We are not going to sell our raw material to Russia for 0,'' Izmukhambetov said.

The oil and gas rich central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is also the world's third largest producer of uranium and has mapped out ambitious expansion plans to benefit from renewed interest in nuclear power worldwide.

Kazatomprom says Kazakhstan could outstrip Canada and Australia as the world's largest uranium producer in the coming decades.

Russia and Kazakhstan already have a uranium mining venture in southern Kazakhstan at the Zarechnoye deposit, with estimated reserves of 19,000 tonnes of the raw material for nuclear fuel.

REUTERS DKS VV2108