On the subject of Adventure Factor, there isn't much to add other than I pinched a nerve in my knee and was hobbling around like a gimp for a couple days. Other than that, pretty much everything has gone extremely well. I got my luggage, which arrived intact, sans coconut. The concrete samples that I am here to measure arrived, successfully passed through Kazak customs, and are now in the spent fuel pond room. I managed to get three of the 21 tests I have to run conducted on Saturday before we left.

Unfortunately, I will have to lower the adventure factor for the remainder of the trip to almost zero for the following reason: The Rennaissance Aktau Hotel is now open for business. I think the first day they accepted guests was Friday; we moved in today after Jim negotiated with their business manager to allow us to stay for the DOE per diem rate ($140/night) instead of their normal lowest rate ($260/night). Sweet. So yeah, no more roughing it. This place has two pools, a sauna, clean drinkable unsmelly clear water, and all of the amenities of a swanky hotel, which it is.

The appearance of this hotel is really the end of an era that I have just caught the tail end of. Since 1991, commercial oil interests have been slowly gearing up to position Kazakhstan as a major oil exporting state. As it turns out, one of the cheapest ways to get oil from Kazakhstan and into a major pipeline network is to float it across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and extreme southern Russia. Aktau, as the largest port city in Kazakhstan, is the natural exit point for these exports. The recent explosive growth in both the Kazak oil industry and in the local port facilities here in Aktau has led to a tremendous amount of wealth being invested in what has been a terribly poor city for decades.

The BN-350 breeder reactor facility received a tremendous amount of government funding during Soviet times as it was part of the Soviet weapons complex. When the Soviet Union collapsed and that money evaporated, the city of 150,000 people was suddenly confronted with the fact that it was unable to support itself on the meager income of its port facilities. A decade of this took its toll on the city, which lapsed into disrepair and poverty.

Now that the oil money is coming in (and coming in the hands of private industry rather than government), the city is revitalizing. It is a bizzare contrast—half of the city is decrepit old Soviet-era structures and the other half is shiny new buildings or under construction. New buildings are popping up everywhere and they are extremely fancy. I have not seen a single new structure that I would call modest. All of the new houses are enormous. The new hotels, condos, and office buildings are all first-rate. All of this is to service the oil industry.

I get the impression that the populace of Aktau is scrambling to come to terms with all of this money. Most of the young people appear to be better off financially than the older folks, as they have secured jobs with the emerging oil industry and the businesses that have sprung up around it. Every employee at the Renaissance Aktau Hotel is under 30, as far as I can tell, and look to be doing very well for themselves. Contrast this with our contact at the reactor facility, who has been working there for 20 years and makes $300/month. Businesses that are not able to take advantage of the oil money are going to have a hell of a time competing, and government-funded facilities like BN-350 will probably continue their slide into decrepitude.

Still, spending time in Aktau has become considerably less adventurous in the last decade. When LANL and IAEA inspectors first came to Aktau in the mid 1990's, the country was still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was no money coming into the town and no infrastructure for hosting guests. There was a single hotel with extremely poor living conditions, lots of crime, no clean water, a single grocery store with bad food and no selection, etc. Most of the resturaunts served food that was unsafe to eat. It was really wild-west. In the last 5 years, a major grocery store has appeared as well as several modern resturaunts. This made the inspector visits more tolerable. My stay at the Victory Hotel with its brown water, etc., represented the status quo as of the last inspector visit. The move to the Renaissance Aktau Hotel means that inspectors in Aktau can now operate at a "western" level of comfort at all times except while actually in the BN-350, which is rather run-down.

To be honest, I got a kick out of dealing with the issues surrounding life in pre-Renaissance Aktau ...but getting into that shower this morning with hot clean water, clean towels, etc... that was awesome.

Not to fear... the next project our team is likely to take on will be Semipolitinsk, which has no oil industry at all. Dirt poor wild-west excitement. I'm looking forward to it. But for now, I'm off to the sauna.