Siemens Energy to relocate division to Hungary so it can supply Paks II without German government's consent

German company Siemens Energy will relocate its nuclear control technology division to Hungary, which is involved in the expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó announced on Tuesday. This will allow the company to circumvent the German government's blocking of its participation in the Paks II project and thus the commissioning of the nuclear power plant.

At the press conference on the subject, Szijjártó said that "the tender for the control technologies for Paks II was won by a consortium of France's Framatome and Germany's Siemens, but as this is technology with dual use, both countries' licenses are necessary for it to be used abroad, which the French have already granted, but the Green Party members of the previous German government have not.

“A decision which is favorable for Hungary was made as a workaround, to have Siemens relocate its nuclear control technology division related to Paks II to Budapest. This process is already underway,” he said.

Péter Szijjártó explained that this is beneficial for Hungary because it will create significant high-tech industrial capacity in the country, and the Hungarian authorities will have to authorize its use. “And the competent Hungarian authorities have granted this authorization, which means that the problem arising from the former lack of German authorization has been solved by Hungarian official authorization,” he emphasized.

This means that the creation of the nervous system of Paks II, i.e. the control technology of Paks II, has been made possible through the cooperation between Framatome and Siemens, as originally intended, and can therefore be implemented according to the original plans," he continued. “Another reason why this is good is because there are many nuclear power plants around the world where the primary circuit is Russian and the control technology is Western European, so today we have taken another important step towards Hungary's energy sovereignty and the success of the Paks II investment,” he said.

It was at the beginning of 2023 that Szijjártó identified it as a problem that a permit from both the French and German governments was required to put the control system manufactured by the Framatome and Siemens consortium into operation, but the latter was missing. At the time, Germany had a government that was explicitly opposed to nuclear energy, with a green, anti-nuclear politician serving as the top minister for economic, energy and climate policy. Since then, however, there have been elections in Germany and a new Christian Democratic-Social Democratic government has been formed – but it seems that they also do not want to allow the export of the technology. Based on Szijjártó's announcement, this will no longer be necessary.

One obstacle to the project has thus been removed, but according to information obtained by Direkt36, the construction of Paks II has been delayed for months due to US sanctions imposed on Gazprombank and has continued to suffer setbacks since then.