BUDAPEST, February 14. /TASS/. France is united with Hungary in the opinion that the European Union should not impose sanctions against the Russian nuclear power industry, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Economic Relations of Hungary Peter Szijjarto said on Tuesday after a meeting in Paris with French Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher.
"We are grateful to the French government for allowing Framatome to supply the control system for the new Paks nuclear power plant. We also agreed that there is no point in imposing sanctions against cooperation with Russia in the nuclear sector," Szijjarto wrote on Facebook (banned in Russia, owned by Meta Corporation, recognized as extremist in Russia).
According to the Hungarian Foreign Minister, at a meeting in Paris, the parties confirmed that "there is a strategic mutual understanding between Hungary and France in the field of nuclear energy."
"To date, the most successful Franco-Hungarian cooperation has been carried out in this area. Together we fought for the EU to recognize nuclear energy as sustainable, and together we are fighting against the discrimination of nuclear energy," the minister added.
The Paks NPP, which was built with Soviet technologies, and which uses Russian nuclear fuel, provides half of all generated and one third of consumed electricity in Hungary. At present, four power units with VVER-440 reactors operate at the station built about 100 kilometers south of Budapest on the banks of the Danube. Currently, preparations are underway for the construction of two new power units designed by Rosatom. At the same time, preparations are underway for the construction of facilities as part of the second stage of the Rosatom project. Specifically, those new units are called Paks-2. The Hungarian government expects that after two new VVER-1200 nuclear reactors are commissioned, the plant's capacity will increase from its current levels of 2,000 MW to 4,400 MW.
In October 2021, JSC Rusatom - Automated Control Systems (RASU, a subsidiary of Rosatom) and the Franco-German consortium Framatome SAS-Siemens AG signed an agreement in Moscow on the manufacture and commissioning of automated process control systems for two new power units of the Paks NPP. Earlier, as part of this project, a contract was signed for the manufacture of turbines by GE Hungary Kft, which is a Hungarian subsidiary of US company General Electric. With this in mind, the withdrawal of nuclear energy from EU sanctions is of particular importance for the Paks-2 project.