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Joe Kaeser, supervisory board chairman at Siemens Energy, spoke out in defense of his company’s plan to continue cooperation with Russia’s Rosatom in Hungary, a partnership that critics say is only putting money in the Kremlin’s pocket, Bloomberg quotes Welt am Sonntag.
As Joe Kaeser said, breaking the agreement signed in 2019, would be very costly for his company. He added that there are NGOs that are arguing that Siemens’ management does not respect these valid contracts. However, then an EU Member State could sue Siemens for almost unlimited sums. At the center of the dispute are the two nuclear power plant blocks that Rosatom is building in Hungary, for which Siemens Energy would supply the safety solutions. Construction already started in August.
Greenpeace’s survey shows that a number of European companies, such as Siemens Energy and France’s Framatome, have signed contracts worth hundreds of euros with Rosatom for the construction of nuclear power plants outside Russia.
Without the transfer of their technologies and know-how, many of the Russian nuclear giant’s projects would be impossible to continue.
The United States and Europe are making efforts to become independent of Russian uranium, Bloomberg says, but Russian nuclear technology is not sanctioned, so Rosatom is operating as normally as before Russia invaded Ukraine last February.
Besides, Kaeser says that
if Hungary did not have access to Siemens, the Chinese would be the main supplier of Paks II controls to Hungary, because the Chinese are much closer to the German solution.
Rosatom is the world’s largest uranium enrichment company, controlling 43 percent of the production capacity involved. It is followed by the British-Dutch-German Urenco with 31 percent, then China National Nuclear Corp. with 13 percent, and France’s Orano is right behind.
Germany shut down its last nuclear power plant this year, and its government representatives are urging the EU to impose sanctions on Russian uranium exports from next year. For his part, Kaeser said he was opposed to nuclear technology because this type of energy production leaves behind hundreds of generations of waste that he said simply could not be safely stored. “It is a moral dilemma,” he stated.
Via vg.hu, Featured image: Facebook/Paks II. Atomerőmű Zrt.