City, Country
Paks/Tolna, Hungary
Number & type of Reactors
4 X VVER 440/213
Net Electric Power as % in 92 of national total
43%
Major population Centers in a 150 km radius and
total estimated population of 150 km r. region
10 million - including Budapest, Gyor, Pecs, Szeged, parts of Croatia, Romania, and Serbia
Date of commercial operation start up
or (if unfinished) date of construction start.
1980
Operator/Builder
Paks Limited, part of MVM Limited - operator. To be privatized
Produces 43% of the total Hungarian electricity supply, making the entire Hungarian grid vulnerable to disruption. There is no plan for waste disposal or decommissioning, which was sent to Russia before the collapse of the Soviet Union. A desperate search has now started for a domestic high-level waste dump.
The nuclear industry argues that Paks is one of the safest plants in the world, and since Paks has performed better than most nuclear plants in the world - this confuses performance with safety. The surviving 2 Chernobyl reactors have some of the best operating statistics for the last few years, yet few consider them safe. And as for industry claims about safety, the IAEA claimed Chernobyl was a model plant just several months before the meltdown at reactor 4. PAKS has the same safety problems as other VVER 440 plants, notably the lack of a full containment, a slow and unreliable scram system, susceptibilty to neutron embrittlement of the reactor pressure vessel, and inadequate emergency protection systems.