Sorrowful prediction: Pines to disappear from Hungary
According to a WWF programme manager, a significant proportion of pines and pine forests will disappear, radically transforming Hungary’s forests. Pines have been languishing for years, living under climate stress in large parts of Europe – including Hungary.
Spruce to disappear from Hungary with time
As InfoStart writes, pines have been under climate stress for many years in large parts of Europe. According to Dr László Gálhidy, increasingly hot and dry summers, storms with extreme weather and the emergence of insect pests not previously typical of the area are all contributing to the death of trees.
The head of WWF Hungary’s Forest Programme points out that in 2019, a tenth of the black pine (Pinus nigra) population was lost in one year. Similar trends can be observed in neighbouring countries. In Germany, more than 110,000 hectares of forest were lost in 2018: an area the size of Hamburg and Bremen combined.
Damage by climate change
The damage to trees is caused by drought, storms and bark beetle damage. It mainly affects spruce trees, as drought and lack of water mean that trees cannot produce enough resin to help them control pests, according to an interview with Dr Gálhidy, published on wmn.hu.
According to the expert, “many pine trees have been planted in places where they would not otherwise have been, and many forests that were previously mixed forests or beech forests have been planted with pine. And this has happened not only in Hungary but also in neighbouring countries”.
No spruce for Christmas, but fear not
According to Gálhidy, from a nature conservation point of view, it is important to restore the original vegetation cover in areas where the pines will soon disappear.
As for Christmas, he also has some bad news. Spruce “will have to go, but not all conifers will disappear from the country. There will be some that can adapt to the changed conditions and some that would have survived naturally in this area before”.
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Lex battery plant: authorities can no longer fine pollutant factories in Hungary?
A government decree issued on 21 September changes the environmental rules for companies in Hungary. As a result, there may now be plants – battery plants, among others – that cannot be fined and closed down by the environmental authority. Some selected firms may thus find themselves in a position where they are technically impossible to sanction. After the news hit the press, the Energy Ministry issued a clarification.
According to Telex, the new regulation creates a new legal category: the environmental authority contract. This would allow even the most polluting companies to escape penalties by signing a contract.
“Environmental authority contract”
Officially, “during an emergency, the environmental authority may conclude an environmental authority contract with the client instead of taking a decision to remedy the breach. In the environmental authority contract, the customer undertakes to cease the infringing conduct and to bring its conduct into compliance with environmental legislation and the requirements of the permit issued by the environmental authority in the manner specified in the environmental authority contract.”
No clarification in the beginning
In other words, if a company fails to comply with environmental rules, the authority will be able to conclude a contract with the company instead of a penalty. In the contract, the company agrees to remedy the non-compliance. The regulation does not specify the type of establishment with which such a contract may be concluded. However, when it was published, many people concluded that it was designed specially for battery factories that continually break the rules in Hungary.
No real means to regulate battery plants
According to Telex, the authorities have not had much leverage to regulate the consistently non-compliant battery factories in Hungary. It was common practice to fine companies with a turnover of several hundred billion forints to HUF 2-3 million. Only the battery-processing plant in Bátonyterenye was recently temporarily closed down after they continued to break all the rules. Several workers even died at the company’s other plant in Szigetszentmiklós.
According to Dalma Dedák, an environmental policy expert at WWF Hungary, the regulation “means that there will be customers who will not receive any penalties, even if they have seriously polluting activities”.
On Friday, Benedek Jávor, a politician from the opposition Párbeszéd (Dialogue for Hungary) party, drew attention to the amendment. According to him, the battery industry in Hungary has now become a “state within a state”, where permits are scandalously permissive, controls are superficial and fines are symbolic. Jávor is therefore turning to the European Commission.
Battery plant, metallurgical plants? Clarification
After the news of the amendment hit the press, the Ministry of Energy said that the regulation would only apply to metallurgical plants. “The government’s intention is that this rule will only apply to operating smelters. Not battery factories. A clarification on this will be published in the Gazette next week,” Telex quoted the ministry as saying.
However, according to Benedek Jávor, “the Ministry is not telling the truth, the regulation was originally intended to cover a much wider range of industries, including battery factories, but as protests erupted, they decided to back out of the proposal. As a way out, they came up with what they hoped would be a less prestige-losing solution, radically narrowing the scope of those affected – effectively nullifying the legislation without having to repeal it.”
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Opposition party wants Hungarian minister to resign
Opposition party LMP is calling on Energy Minister Csaba Lantos to resign as according to them a government decree that came into effect on Friday favours polluting and environmentally destructive companies.
László Lóránt Keresztes, a member of LMP and the chairman of parliament’s sustainable development committee, said on Sunday that citing the wartime emergency, the government put into effect a decree that allows “polluting and environmentally destructive companies to avoid fines, and which makes it impossible to close plants in the event of serious environmental pollution”.
Keresztes said LMP has already announced that they will turn to the Constitutional Court of Hungary because of the “destruction” of the environmental protection institutional system.
Keresztes said the situation would not be solved even if, keeping to its promises, the government revokes the decree as “the licensing procedure for dangerous industrial plants and battery factories is chaotic”.
Read also:
- Budapest ranks among the worst in the EU in air pollution
- Breakthrough: Hungarian invention saves the planet from plastic waste
He noted that “in several cases, the government allows waiving the strictest environmental protection licensing procedures” and the scandals surrounding the licensing procedures of polluting plants are still ongoing.
Keresztes said it must be made clear that “it is a complete surrender of sovereignty when the government sacrifices and puts up for sale Hungary’s natural treasures for the benefit of foreign manufacturers and investors”.
Hungarian rescue team to arrive in flood-stricken Libyan port city soon
Hungarian rescue teams will soon arrive in the Libyan port city of Derna to begin a search and rescue mission after the dams protecting the city collapsed due to heavy rain earlier this week, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said on Friday.
Hungary has been in constant contact with the Libyan authorities since the disaster struck, and the foreign ministry has allocated 14 million forints (EUR 36,000) to send a team of 37 people and 3 dogs to help with search and rescue efforts, Szijjártó said in a post on Facebook.
Here is a video of the devastation in Derna:
The members of the Pest County Search and Rescue Service, the Budapest Rescue Organisation and the Inter Rescue Group are travelling to Libya via Türkiye, with the Turkish authorities and the diplomats of the Hungarian embassy there working to make sure that the Hungarian team can begin its mission in Derna as soon as possible, the minister said.
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Lake Velence could completely disappear by 2050
Lake Velence, the third largest natural lake and one of the most popular holiday resorts in Hungary, is located only 50 km from Budapest. Also known as the “Sunshine Lake”, it has made more headlines than usual in 2022. Last year, the water level of the lake had dropped to a critically low level. Although there was no similar threat this year, a study suggests that the lake could simply ‘disappear’ in our lifetime.
Last summer, the water level in Lake Velence dropped to a low of 58 cm in some places, instead of the average 158 cm, a level never seen in decades! On the beaches, holidayers were greeted by muddy water instead. The low and warm water has also been accompanied by mass fish kills, with more than 1.5 tonnes of fish were removed from the lake last year. As a result, a bathing ban was imposed on one beach due to poor water quality. If we don’t want to see a dried-out Lake Velence, we have to be careful of our groundwater resources close to the lake, writes Masfelfok.hu
Lake Velence has dried up several times in history
Since 2022, the issue has regularly been the subject of public debates. Many wonder if Lake Velence can really dry up, and if so, when? As far as we know, it has “dried up” fourteen times in its 1500 years lifetime, on average of about once every 100 years.
Similar example was last recorded between 1863 and 1866, when, according to rumours, the Hussar Regiment of Fehérvár practiced in the dusty mud. Hence, from a geological point of view, drying up is a natural alteration of the lake. The question, is to what extent this is influenced today by the increasing man-made climate crisis.
As per the researchers, it seems certain that the increasing difference between annual precipitation and evaporation would dry out the lake. In recent decades, except of 2010, annual evaporation has always been higher than precipitation.
However, the above mentioned analysis shows that the water balance of Lake Velence has always recovered after periods of water shortage. The shortage compensated by both natural processes and human interventions: the surface water inflows from the catchment area, previously ignored groundwater inflows and the two reservoirs in Pátka and Zámolyi.
Two different scenarios
The researchers used a so-called climate simulation to model future changes in the lake level. The water experts created a hydrogeological model using three regional climate simulations for the period up to 2050. They wanted to know what harmful impact human activities caused concerning the state of the lake. Two scenarios were considered. One was an optimistic version with immediate reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, assuming a maximum global warming of 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. The other, pessimistic scenario assumed that by 2100 humanity will badly fail to reduce emissions, and fossil energy use will continue to increase.
No reason to panic?
Based on the results, the authors of Masfelfok.hu state that the annual rainfall-evaporation balance will not change significantly over the years in the Lake Velence area if the optimistic scenario proves to be true. In the pessimistic scenario was to happen, however, the delicate water level balance becomes so disrupted that we can expect the worst by 2050. According to the researchers, the results of the simulations with the hydrogeological model so far show that the lake receives a considerable amount of water from below the surface, about 3,100 cubic metres per day, which is responsible for an average rise in the water level of almost 5 centimetres per year.
In other words, the fate of Lake Velence could depend on how we manage the groundwater resources around the lake – the researchers stress.
Hungarian minister shared what is needed to reach decarbonisation goals
Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) is essential for reaching decarbonisation goals, Csaba Lantos, the energy minister, said on Saturday.
Carbon dioxide emissions have fallen by 37 percent in Hungary since 1990, and the National Energy and Climate Strategy (read more about that HERE) calls for a 50 percent reduction by 2030, he said at a presentation of a book on carbon dioxide storage and utilisation opportunities in Hungary. Last year, Hungary was the fourth most effective EU member state in reducing carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy production, he said, having reduced this ratio by 8.6 percent. Only the three Benelux countries outperformed Hungary, he added.
Citing a recent Hungarian study, Lantos said CCUS may be the only way of ensuring the viability of existing power plants and industrial facilities, which can be retrofitted with carbon dioxide capture technology. Electricity generated by renewable energy can replace some processes, but not all industrial processes can be made electricity-based, he said, citing the examples of heavy industry, long-distance transport and cement production, which would rely of CCUS to achieve zero emissions.
Read also:
- After months of despair, good news for solar panel owners in Hungary – Read more HERE
- Hungary to start receiving gas from north
Parts of the steel industry that use CCUS technologies now are the most advanced and cheapest low-carbon solutions for the production of new steel, he said. Only twenty large emitters account for 70 percent of Hungarian emissions where CCUS is relevant, so it would be fairly easy to make changes with relatively few players involved, he said. Around 47 million tonnes of carbon dioxide are spewed into the country’s atmosphere annually, much of it by fossil fuelled power plants, metal producers, the chemical industry and cement makers. Since these produce emissions in large volumes they are big CCUS contenders, he added.
Hungarian opposition says slash use of farm chemicals
Opposition LMP has called for the use of agricultural chemicals to be slashed, and it will resubmit its bill on phasing out the pesticide glyphosate.
The European Union is considering what to do about the potentially carcinogenic chemical and will make a decision in October, László Lóránt Keresztes, the chairman of parliament’s sustainable development committee, told a press conference on Tuesday.
He called on the government to consider prohibiting the chemical’s use nationwide, and LMP has also turned to several ministers with a request that they review a study carried out by the European Greens and the European Plant Protection Action Network (PAN Europe) showing the large presence of glyphosate in European natural waters.
Glyphosate poses a risk to the environment, damaging aquatic organisms in current concentrations, according to the study.
Hungary amongst countries with the smallest carbon footprints
A new study has revealed the countries with the smallest carbon footprint, and with 79g of carbon emissions per passenger per km, Hungary features in the top 10.
The experts at Utility Bidder have carried out research to reveal the UK airports and countries with the biggest and smallest carbon footprints by analysing the number of carbon emissions emitted per person per km.
Top 10 countries with the smallest carbon footprint
|
Rank |
Country/ Territory |
Carbon emissions (g per passenger per km) |
|
1 |
Puerto Rico |
73 |
|
2 |
Greece |
78 |
|
3 |
Hungary |
79 |
|
4 |
Vietnam |
80 |
|
5 |
Netherlands |
81 |
|
5 |
Romania |
81 |
|
5 |
Bulgaria |
81 |
|
8 |
Portugal |
82 |
|
8 |
Ethiopia |
82 |
|
10 |
Morocco |
83 |
On Utility Bidder’s top three list of countries/territories with the lowest levels of airport-related carbon emissions is Hungary. Airports here are currently producing around 79g of carbon emissions per passenger per km, and while this is the third lowest in the world, there is still room for improvement.
The research has also revealed:
- Jersey Airport produces 156g of carbon emissions per passenger per km which is the highest figure in the UK, followed by London City with 154g per passenger per km.
- Glasgow Prestwick Airport produces 64g of carbon emissions per passenger per km which is the lowest figure in the UK, followed by Bournemouth with 67g per passenger per km.
- Airports in Luxembourg emit 104g of carbon emissions per passenger per km which is the highest in the world, closely followed by the US Virgin Islands with 103g per passenger per km.
Hungarian opposition calls for west-facing orientation
Opposition parties called on the government to strengthen European values and Hungary’s west-facing orientation on the national holiday of 20 August, named after state-founder king Saint Stephen.
The Democratic Coalition said in a statement that Hungarians had been a European nation ever since the founding of the state, yet currently “instead of our natural allies, only eastern dictators are willing to engage in dialogue with the Hungarian government”.
“When the Hungarian government is the only one in Europe that roots for Europe’s defeat in a war, we can be sure that they have let us down and our nation has been made to leave the path marked for us at the founding of our state,” it added.
Co-leader of the Socialists Ágnes Kunhalmi said in a statement that when Saint Stephen had chosen a west-facing orientation for Hungary, “he made the right decision because instead of building from the past, he chose the future”.
Contrary to this, Hungary’s current regime celebrates from Saint Stephen’s heritage only the power of the state and the inseparable relation of church and state, she said.
Párbeszéd said in a statement that commemorating the founding of the state should not involve “wasteful squandering of money, damaging the environment and health”. The party condemned the 20 August fireworks display, stating that “it is not fireworks that makes a nation great but the multitude of well-educated people”.
Momentum leader and group leader Ferenc Gelencsér said in a video message that it was Hungarians’ decision to belong to the west rather than the east made a thousand years ago which should be celebrated on 20 August. “What we celebrate is that our statehood links us to western democracies instead of eastern dictatorships,” he added.
VIDEO: Earthquake in East Hungary
Several minor earthquakes occurred in eastern Hungary on Saturday, the disaster management authority told MTI.
At 11.13am, an earthquake registering a 4 on the Richter scale was reported near the town of Gyomaendrőd, in the southeast, the National Directorate of Disaster Management said, citing a report by the Kövesligeti Rado Seismology Observatory. The tremor was felt in several nearby settlements, but so far the disaster management authority has received no reports of damage.
A few minutes later, another 4.0 magnitude earthquake was registered near Turkeve in the east, with the tremors again being felt in nearby towns. At 12.51pm, the observatory registered a 2.8 magnitude earthquake near the south-eastern town of Szarvas. Later in the afternoon, two aftershocks with magnitudes of 2.8 and a 3.5 were registered around Szarvas, the observatory said, adding that more could be expected.
Read also:
- Lake Balaton can be hit by earthquake at any time – Read more HERE
- PHOTOS: Hungarians saved more than 30 lives in Türkiye
Here is the video posted by the Kövesligeti Rado Seismology Observatory:
20 August fireworks: Budapest Mayor highlights importance of environmental protection
The mayor of Budapest has highlighted the importance of environmental protection during preparations for the celebration of the founding of the Hungarian state.
“We must consider the obligation our glorious past demands of us for the future,” Gergely Karácsony said on Facebook on Friday. “Let’s celebrate with humility towards the heritage entrusted to us: our environment.”
He accused organisers of a concert to be held in the Taban district of the capital on Sunday of showing “zero interest” in the park’s environment, and he appealed to concert-goers to take care of the area.
Referring to the national holiday fireworks, he said: “Some like fireworks but others are outraged that money is being spent on them during hard times.”
Pointing to the pollution, noise and stress felt by animals, he said fireworks should be replaced by light shows using new technologies.
The following picture was taken in the Taban district:
“The oldest tree in the Taban has been standing here for at least two hundred years. The park was renovated a few years ago at a cost of HUF half a billion. It does not deserve this. The concert organisers seem to be totally indifferent to this,” Karácsony wrote in his Facebook post.
PM’s chief of staff: Preserving St. Stephen’s legacy ‘protecting freedom’
Preserving the legacy of King St. Stephen “means protecting freedom and Europe’s traditional values and promoting national sovereignty,” Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, told a celebration on Friday, ahead of Hungary’s 20 August national holiday.
Marking the “1023rd birth anniversary of the Hungarian state”, Gulyás called on Hungarians to show gratitude for “40 lifespans of work and service through which the nation has survived over the centuries”.
“We must study the path behind us so that we do not lose the way ahead,” he said.
Gulyás also highlighted the work of St. Stephen in “choosing Christianity and the West of those times”. He added, however, that “after a thousand years the situation in Europe is such that there is no longer a path to western Europe through Christianity.”
“Whatever has been shared in European faith, culture and thinking has been rejected, forgotten and left behind by western Europe,” he said, adding that Christianity had been “banned from society’s basic principles, laws and politics, allowing an ideology to take over questioning, rejecting and removing all European values.”
At the ceremony, Gulyás, on behalf of President Katalin Novák, handed over the Order of Merit of Hungary, Commander’s Cross, to István Zsolt Gyulai, Olympic and world champion kayaker, head of the Hungarian Olympic Committee, as well as Gabriella Vukovich, retired head of the Central Statistical Office.
PHOTOS: Record-high water level on River Dráva, but Hungary’s flood management ‘superb’
The authorities combatting flooding on Hungary’s rivers have performed superbly in recent days, partly owing to experiences gained during the great floods ten years ago, a government official said on Thursday.
Torrential rain in western parts of the country has resulted in the serious swelling of rivers, István György, a state secretary of the prime minister’s office, told a press conference in Drávaszabolcs by the River Dráva, adding that flood barriers in Baranya County have held strong this past week. Instructed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, officials participating in flood protection efforts have maintained close online communication with the government, he noted, also highlighting the contributions of the police, disaster managers, water experts, and local mayors.
The River Dráva at Drávaszabolcs is expected to peak on Friday morning at a near-record level, he said. Fully 31 settlements in the Drávaszabolcs area are being protected, and the first signs of subsidence on the river at Szentborbas has been observed, so flood protection efforts will be maintained in perilous sections of the Dráva until the end of next week, a water management official said.
Here is Orbán’s video:
Hungarian disaster authority offers aid to flood-stricken Slovenia
Hungary’s disaster management authority (OKF) has offered a diving team, pumps and flood protection equipment to Slovenia to help with flood mitigation. The authority said on Thursday that it had offered a 22-member diving team equipped with all-terrain vehicles and boats, 6 high-performance pumps and operating personnel, 2 excavators, 2 tipper trucks, 2 technical experts, sandbags, and other tools necessary for flood protection. The aid will only be sent to Slovenia once it has been accepted, OKF’s statement said.
Volunteers remove over 6 tonnes of waste from River Tisza
Some 6.1 tonnes of waste has been removed from a 70km stretch of the River Tisza near Szolnok, in central Hungary, by environmental volunteers working over the past several days, the organisers of the 11th Tisza PET Cup competition said on Tuesday.
Thanks to waste collection at the catchment areas and the upper Tisza region in recent years, as well as the dam in Kisköre, less waste was found in the wooded areas along the river, the statement said. The 11th Tisza PET Cup was won by a team of Siemens Energy who collected 254 bags of waste out of the total 937 bags accumulated during the competition, it added.
The ministry of energy affairs was the main sponsor of the competition this year. Thanks to the series of PET Cup competitions, several hundreds of thousands of kilos of waste have been removed from Hungarian rivers in the past decade, more than twice as much as by the Ocean CleanUp scheme renowned for similar efforts targeting oceans, the statement said.
Of the 328,000 kgs of waste collected by the environmental volunteers over the years in Hungary, some 60 percent has been recycled, it added.
Here is the video:
And some photos:
Have you read THIS one? Floating body was found near a popular Budapest beach.
Forests intentionally destroyed in Hungary?
The opposition LMP has called on the government to scrap a decree allowing for “economic destruction of forests”, passed a year ago and aimed at ensuring firewood supplies.
LMP spokesperson Anna Süveg told a press conference on Friday that “Hungary’s forests are still endangered” due to the “amateurish” government decree “passed in a rush, in a fright of the energy crisis.”
“Winter is drawing near and forests are threatened again by destruction,” she said, adding that “producing marketable firewood or financing showcase investments come before leaving forests unviolated”. Süveg said her party would re-submit a relevant draft in September, noting that the proposal had once been voted down by parliament’s Fidesz-led majority.
Two arrested over shooting of wolf that wandered from Switzerland to Hungary — VIDEO
Police have arrested two men in connection with the illegal shooting of a protected wolf which wandered from Switzerland to Hungary earlier this year, the National Investigation Bureau (NNI) said on the website police.hu on Thursday.
The wolf, dubbed M237, had been tracked across Europe through a GPS collar it was fitted with, but in early April the signal was suddenly lost, raising the possibility that the wolf may have died, the NNI said in a statement.
An investigation was ordered into the case against an unidentified perpetrator for causing damage to the natural environment, the statement said.
Investigators concluded that the protected wolf had been shot dead by a group of hunters on April 1 on the outskirts of the border village of Hidasnémeti in the northeast.
The Hungaian perpetrators, one of whom was a professional hunter, removed the GPS collar from the wolf and threw it into the river, the NNI said, adding that the hunters had been aware that they had shot a protected animal. The authorities have yet to find the wolf’s carcass, they added.
The two men were arrested in the early hours of Wednesday morning with the help of counter-terrorism force TEK, as one of them had a legally-owned firearm.
Hungarian socialists call for regulating liability insurance for polluting plants
The opposition Socialists call for regulating the liability insurance for environmentally polluting plants, deputy group leader Zita Gurmai said on Thursday.
She told an online press conference that currently there was no regulation in force on the amount of a third-party liability insurance.
Socialists Zita Gurmai said she had submitted a written question to János Lázár, the minister for construction and transport, asking “What are the guarantees against the operation of environmentally polluting plants when there are currently no detailed regulations in place specifying the amount for a third-party liability insurance”.
In the current legal environment, with the proliferation of battery plants, “neither the environment, not employees are safe”, she added.
She said it was absurd that projects worth several HUF billion that pose a threat to local water supplies in a given city can get away with specifying a combined compensation limit which involves HUF 500,000 (EUR 1,309) per occasion or maximum HUF 1 million a year.
Paks plant further reduces output due to warming Danube
Since Tuesday, the Paks nuclear plant has reduced its output by 560 megawatts due to rising temperatures of the Danube river, the water of which is used for cooling its system.
The National Atomic Energy Agency (OAH) said on its website on Wednesday that the output was reduced by 320 megawatts on Tuesday, followed by another, 240 megawatt reduction on Wednesday. The measure has been necessitated by environmental regulations and has not impacted nuclear safety, the authority said. It added that the current technologies in place could ensure cooling the facility “even with 90 percent less water in the river or if its water were of high temperature”.
According to the plant’s internal regulations, output is reduced by 80 megawatts/0.1 C above 29.5 C of water temperature, the plant said earlier.
Paks nuclear power plant in trouble: it runs with reduced performance
Hungary’s nuclear power plant in Paks reduced its performance due to the significant increase in the water temperature of the Danube River, the Hungarian News Agency said in a statement.
According to telex.hu, the Danube’s water temperature reached 29.72 degrees at the measuring point. Therefore, from 4.30 PM, the nuclear power plant reduced the performance of blocks 2, 3, and 4 by 240 megawatts. According to a 2001 environmental protection ministerial decree, the water temperature around Paks cannot exceed 30 °C.
In the power plant’s interior regulation, 29.5 degrees is the intervention limit. Provided they reach that, they reduce the power plant’s performance by 80 megawatts per 0.1 °C to reach the prescribed temperature level.
River Danube near Paks:
Paks head replaced due to political reasons
Géza Pekárik did an outstanding job as the head of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant. Nobody ever complained about his work. The Orbán cabinet decorated him because of that. Even so, he was dismissed because Jánor Péter Horváth, the former leader of the Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority (MEKH) needed his position, hvg.hu wrote. However, Mr Horváth does not have experience in running a nuclear facility.
Mr Horváth is an old member of Orbán’s Fidesz party. For example, he lead the party’s Szolnok organisation in the 1990s. His political career broke when the court convicted him for malpractice, but he retained his influence in the party. That is why the government did not let him leave. He had to resign from the presidency of the MEKH last year due to some Fidesz mayors’ rage caused by the skyrocketing energy prices their cities had to deal with.
However, Horváth is an oil engineer and does not have any experience in running a nuclear facility. Furthermore, the future is challenging for Paks since the Russians build two new blocks. Meanwhile, they cannot shut down the operating ones in the 2030s. Currently, waterproof walls are being built around the two new blocks: