Le Monde today reported that France’s energy transition ministry will allow Framatome, a nuclear energy subsidiary of Électricité de France (EDF), to participate in the construction of two reactors at the Hungarian Paks-2 nuclear power plant alongside Russian nuclear giant Rosatom. They report that there was an extensive discussion between Macron and Orban last month on the matter. Le Monde’s source, one close to Agnès Pannier-Runacher, France’s minister of energy transition, said that, “to date, the European sanctions do not target the [Russian] nuclear industry. If French actors wish to engage in partnerships with other European actors, we are not going to prevent them from doing so. French players in the nuclear industry support our European partners, and in particular Hungary, in all their approaches and in all the projects they carry out on their soil as long as they strictly respect the European framework of international sanctions.”
Last month, according to RT, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said they might rely more upon France’s Framatome, after Germany’s Siemens Energy was blocked by Berlin from supplying control systems for the new Russian reactors. Evidently, Berlin has a different application of Ukraine-related sanctions on top of their own closing down of nuclear energy. RT reports that Siemens Energy confirmed that their application for an export license for the Paks-2 project remains in the “still pending” category.
