Aktau is Kazakhstan's only significant port on the Caspian Sea, and it exists because of uranium: founded in the 1960s as Shevchenko, a closed Soviet city built around ore processing and served by a fast breeder reactor that also ran the desalination plant supplying the city's drinking water. There is no river and almost no rain here — the water came from the sea, through the reactor.
The Soviet street grid still has no street names in the old centre, only numbered microdistricts, which makes navigating by address an exercise in patience. Today the city functions as the staging post for oil work offshore, for freight crossing the Caspian toward Baku, and for travellers heading inland into the Mangystau desert.