Paks II Nuclear Power Plant construction start announced

The first concrete for the upgrade of the Paks nuclear power plant will be poured by early February 2026, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said in Moscow on Wednesday, after talks with Alexey Likhachev, the director general of Rosatom.

In a statement issued by his ministry, Szijjártó said the pouring of the concrete would be a “milestone” in the Paks II project, officially qualifying the blocks as “under construction” according to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) standards.

He added that the fifth and sixth blocks at Paks would go online at the start of the 2030s. Szijjártó said the construction of the additional blocks would ensure Hungarian households continued to pay the lowest gas prices in Europe.

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Hungary sticking to safe energy supply, Europe’s lowest gas prices, says Szijjártó

Hungary’s government is committed to ensuring the country’s secure energy supply as well as keeping household gas prices the lowest in the European Union, said in a panel discussion at Russian Energy Week in Moscow on Wednesday.

Szijjártó told the panel that European leaders were “going crazy” when they suggested that “diversification” meant swapping out one source of energy for another, in a statement issued by his ministry. He added that the Hungarian government aimed to have as many sources of supply and delivery routes as possible. He said Hungary saw energy supply not as a “political or ideological” matter but one of “physics, mathematics and experience”. He added that some sources of energy would remain “a dream” without adequate infrastructure for their delivery.