On Thursday evening, the Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority issued a permit for the Paks II project - the expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant, which will be carried out by the Russian state corporation Rosatom.
This is reported by Telex.
The relevant decisions were published on the website of the regulator without additional announcement. The most important of them concerns the creation of a safety zone around the fifth and sixth units of the nuclear power plant.
For a long time, Russia sought for Rosatom to receive a permit to operate on the territory of the European Union and build its nuclear power plant.
As Telex notes, according to some sources, the Paks II construction permit could become a condition under which Russia agreed to give Hungary an additional 700 million cubic meters of gas after the visit of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto to Moscow.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not force Hungary to abandon energy cooperation with Russia. Back in March, the head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry said that Budapest is adhering to its agreement on the import of Russian gas and does not plan to cancel the expansion of its Paks nuclear power plant.
In June, the portal Direkt 36 published an investigation, according to which the expansion of the NPP will be located above a tectonic fault, which threatens to slide from one side of the fault and, accordingly, the destruction of the plant.
But already after that, on July 1, Sijarto announced that the construction of "Paksh II" could begin in September. As previously reported in the mass media, the construction cost is 12.5 billion euros. Of these, Russia allocated a 10 million euro loan to Rosatom.