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In his address, Mr Orbán stressed that the currently emerging challenges had especially highlighted the importance of safe energy supply.
“The question is evident: how can we generate large quantities of electricity in a cheap, safe, sustainable and environmentally friendly manner? The answer is clear: only electricity generated from nuclear energy is able to meet these requirements,” he laid down.
He said Hungary has used nuclear energy for five decades, providing security for the country’s energy supply. Some one half of Hungary’s electricity is generated by a nuclear power plant, covering around a third of the country’s electricity needs. Based on this experience, Hungary has decided not only to maintain its already existing capacities, but to invest even more in nuclear energy, and to increase its share in Hungary’s national power supply by 70 per cent. According to his information, a 2,400-megawatt capacity will be connected to the network at the beginning of the next decade.
“This will enable us to avoid the importation of some 3.5 billion cubic metres of gas annually, and will contribute to a 17 million-tonne reduction in Hungary’s annual carbon dioxide emission. This is five times the entire Hungarian transport sector’s emission, and three times the quantity that Hungarian forests are able to break down,” he said.
In his words, “we acknowledge with pleasure” that, regardless of the present geopolitical difficulties, we continue to maintain wide-ranging international professional and scientific cooperation schemes in the field of nuclear energy while Russia has in the past year become the United States’ number one uranium supplier, and a number of American, German, French, Swedish, Swiss and Austrian subcontractors are working together with Russian contractors “on our nuclear enlargement project,” he stated.
“It is in the best interests of us all that we prevent nuclear energy from being taken hostage by geopolitical conflicts, hypocrisy and ideological debates,” Mr Orbán said, adding “please allow me to thank you for having intervened in the case concerning our nuclear project that is currently being heard before the European Union’s court, thereby guaranteeing a safe supply of nuclear fuel for our already existing nuclear power plant.”
Speaking to members of the press, the Prime Minister repeated that the issue of energy very frequently fell victim to ideological approaches.
“This is bad as energy is neither an ideological, nor a geopolitical issue. We want to rescue nuclear energy from this trap,” he said.
He further pointed out that nuclear energy was the only source of energy that did not pose a hazard to the environment and was at the same time capable of producing large quantities of electric power. Therefore, Hungary fully supports it, Mr Orbán added.
