Putin on state visit to Budapest – new supply agreement with Gazprom – Rosatom builds two reactor units
Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Budapest at the invitation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to lay a wreath at a World War II memorial to the Red Army and to negotiate energy cooperation. According to Orban, a new contract for the supply of natural gas, which was agreed upon in the process, stipulates that in the future Hungary will only have to pay Gazprom for the amount of gas that is actually consumed there. This individual contract has been met with criticism, especially in Poland, where they wanted new energy supply agreements with Russia to be negotiated by the EU Commission, where Warsaw can have a say.
Already on 1. January 2015, a contract signed last year with Rosatom to build two new 1,200-megawatt reactor units to the Paksh nuclear power plant, scheduled to come on line in 2023, came into force. The twelve billion euros that this construction will cost will be financed to 80 percent with a Russian loan that must be repaid by 2045 with 4.5 to 4.9 percent interest.
So far, Paksch’s four 500-megawatt reactors meet just under half of Hungary’s electricity needs. These four reactors are scheduled to be shut down by 2032. With the increase in capacity to 2400 megawatts, it is hoped to reduce the current share of electricity from oil, which is just under 25 percent, and from coal, which is just under 20 percent. Producing surpluses, they could possibly find buyers in Bavaria, where one after the other they said goodbye to pumped storage, wind turbines and, most recently, power lines from northern and eastern Germany. Hungarian nuclear power is already flowing into Austrian pumped storage, providing a base load when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
The Hungarian nuclear power plant Paksch. Photo: Barna Rovacs (Rovibroni). License: CC BY-SA 4.0.
Because in the Paksh only an existing nuclear power plant is being modernized and expanded and no new one is being built, the construction did not have to be approved in Brussels. If such a licensing requirement had existed, difficulties were to be expected: Not only because there is an influential French nuclear rival, but also because the Brussels-Moscow relationship is worse than the relationship of individual EU member states with Russia.
The fact that the planned gas pipeline through the Black Sea will not land in Bulgaria as planned is mainly due to prere from Brussels, which the government in Sofia could not withstand. The Hungarian Prime Minister is more self-confident towards the EU, even though he has so far agreed to all sanctions against the Russian Federation. However, like government politicians from the other countries, he criticized the sanctions.u.K successor states Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that such artificially erected trade barriers were damaging above all to the EU countries themselves.
In the past, when it comes to Ukraine, the real politician has mainly acted as the protector of the 200 or so Ukrainians.000 Magyars, who make up the majority of the population in two districts bordering on Hungary. In 2014 he demanded autonomy rights for these regions, but not annexation to Hungary.