Visegrád Four: No new nuclear regulations
A meeting of Visegrád Four (Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia) leaders is currently taking place in Budapest, with yesterday’s primary headline-grabber the quartet’s consensus in a stand against proposed changes to European Commission nuclear safety regulations.
Said new regulations were an EC response to the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster of 2011 and include mandatory guidelines for stress testing, regular reviews, provision of emergency centers, and national assessment of disaster scenarios.
“I welcome the joint strategy of the Visegrád Four,” stated Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico at the summit. “We cannot imagine the EC accepting major powers in the sphere of nuclear safety. This is part of national sovereignty and it belongs to relevant international institutions.”
Fico went continued along the same lines, saying that “We respect countries that do not use the atom [, and] we expect the countries that do not use nuclear energy to respect those who do.”
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán explained in brief to local media after the talks yesterday that “We expect the European Union to help rather than hinder the increase of nuclear capacity in central Europe … This area must not be over-regulated and the issue of state aid for energy investments should also be reviewed, because we think that nuclear energy is being discriminated against here.”
Orbán had made a point of touting a “stronger alliance … most notably in the field of nuclear energy” between Hungary and Britain, another EU member state against further regulation of the industry, when visiting with Prime Minister David Cameron in London last week.
Dana Drábová of the Czech Republic’s Nuclear Safety Office (SUJB) called the proposed amendment “premature” and current EC regulations “sufficient.”
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