Chapter LXVI: Központi Nukleáris Pénzügyi Alap (Central Nuclear Financial Fund)

Overview

Chapter LXVI is the Központi Nukleáris Pénzügyi Alap (KNPA) — the Central Nuclear Financial Fund — a separated state fund (elkülönített állami pénzalap) established on 1 January 1998 under the 1996 atomic energy law (1996. évi CXVI. törvény). Its sole mandate is to finance the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle: final disposal of radioactive waste, interim storage of spent fuel, closure of the fuel cycle, and decommissioning of nuclear installations.¹ The operating arm is RHK Kft. (Radioaktív Hulladékokat Kezelő Kft. — the Radioactive Waste Management Company), which prepares the medium- and long-term plan and the annual work programmes.²

The 2026 chapter shows total expenditure of 42,258.1 millió Ft (12,577.7 millió Ft operating, 29,680.4 millió Ft capital) against total revenue of 89,557.8 millió Ft, leaving a chapter balance of +47,299.7 millió Ft. The Fund runs a planned surplus: it accumulates today against decommissioning and deep-disposal liabilities that fall due decades from now. The largest single revenue line — 53,974.7 millió Ft labelled Költségvetési támogatás — is, on inspection, not a discretionary subsidy of nuclear operations but a value-preservation transfer; this is the analytically load-bearing item in the chapter and is examined in detail below.

This is, structurally, the cleanest chapter in the budget from a classical-liberal standpoint. It is a polluter-pays fund: the entity that creates the irreversible hazard is statutorily compelled to pre-fund its remediation, and the money is ring-fenced so a future government cannot spend it on something else. The framework’s quarrel is not with the Fund’s existence but with two narrower questions — whether the Költségvetési támogatás line is genuinely a value-preservation mechanism or a disguised cross-subsidy, and whether the local-government transfer (item 6) is rights-protection or concentrated rent.

Expenditure Analysis

Kis- és közepes aktivitású radioaktívhulladék-tárolók beruházása, fejlesztése (Investment and development of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste repositories)

• Current allocation: 8,896.5 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Low- and intermediate-level waste disposal — the Bátaapáti National Radioactive Waste Repository is the principal asset here — is a protective response to irreversible involuntary harm. Radioactive waste already exists; it was created by electricity generation that has already been consumed. The disposal facility is not an optional public amenity whose level a market could be left to discover; it is the physical containment of a hazard that, left unmanaged, imposes its cost on parties who never consented to bear it and who in many cases are not yet born. This is the narrow category the framework recognises as a rights matter rather than a preference matter. The expenditure is also fully covered by operator contributions (see Revenue Items) — it is the nuclear industry paying for its own containment, intermediated through a ring-fenced fund.
• Transition mechanism: None. The line is retained. Operating- efficiency review of RHK Kft.’s capital procurement remains appropriate — Keep does not preclude scrutiny of whether the repository programme is delivered at competitive cost — but the function is kept.
• Affected groups: None adversely. The cost-bearer is the operator via the levy; the beneficiary is every household within the hazard radius and every future taxpayer who would otherwise inherit an unfunded liability.

Nagy aktivitású radioaktívhulladék-tároló telephely kiválasztása (Site selection for the high-level radioactive waste repository)

• Current allocation: 1,738.5 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Site characterisation for a deep geological repository for high-level waste and spent fuel — the long-running Boda Claystone Formation research programme in Baranya county³ — is the most irreversibility-laden activity in the chapter. High-level waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years; the geological investigation that establishes whether a host rock can isolate it is precisely the protective function the framework keeps. There is no voluntary-financing alternative here not because of any abstract market-failure category, but because the obligation is the operator’s own, statutorily assigned, and the operator funds it through the levy. The line is small and the activity is bounded by a defined programme.
• Transition mechanism: None. Retained.
• Affected groups: None adversely.

Kiégett Kazetták Átmeneti Tárolójának bővítése, felújítása (Expansion and refurbishment of the Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility)

• Current allocation: 18,909.8 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The Kiégett Kazetták Átmeneti Tárolója (KKÁT — Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility) at Paks holds the spent fuel discharged from the operating reactors. As the existing Paks units continue to operate, discharged assemblies accumulate, and the interim store must be expanded to hold them safely pending a final disposal route. This is the single largest capital line in the chapter — 45% of the 29,680.4 millió Ft capital budget — and it is the most direct expression of the polluter-pays principle in the entire 2026 budget: the cost of safely storing spent fuel is incurred as the fuel is spent, and is met from operator contributions rather than deferred onto a future general-revenue rescue. A line that pre-funds an irreversible hazard from the hazard-creator’s own contributions is a Keep on the framework’s own terms.
• Transition mechanism: None. Retained.
• Affected groups: None adversely. The honest reading is the reverse of a cut: the danger in nuclear-waste finance is under- provision — a fund that is too small when decommissioning falls due. The 2026 capital programme is the system working as designed.

Nukleáris létesítmények leszerelésének előkészítése (Preparation for decommissioning of nuclear installations)

• Current allocation: 135.6 millió Ft (capital)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Decommissioning preparation — planning the eventual dismantling of reactors and associated installations — is a small, technical, bounded line. Decommissioning is an unavoidable terminal cost of nuclear generation; pre-funding it through the operator levy is the alternative to the failure mode in which a plant reaches end-of-life with no provision and the cost lands on the general taxpayer. Keep.
• Transition mechanism: None. Retained.
• Affected groups: None.

RHK Kft. működése, radioaktívhulladék-tárolók és a KKÁT üzemeltetési kiadásai (Operation of RHK Kft., and operating costs of the waste repositories and the KKÁT)

• Current allocation: 10,995.6 millió Ft (operating)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line funds RHK Kft. itself — the state-owned company that operates Bátaapáti, the KKÁT, and the other facilities — together with the day-to-day operating cost of the repositories. It is 87% of the chapter’s operating expenditure. The activity is inseparable from the disposal mandate the framework keeps: someone has to physically run the storage facilities, and the cost is met from operator contributions. The classification is Keep on function. It carries the one operating-efficiency caveat worth stating explicitly: RHK Kft. is a state-owned monopoly operator with no competitive benchmark, and the absence of a market price for its services means there is no signal telling whether 10,995.6 millió Ft is the efficient cost of the work or a comfortable one. The framework keeps the function but recommends that RHK Kft.’s cost base be benchmarked against international waste-management operators (the cost-per-cubic-metre of disposal is internationally comparable), and that discrete work packages — engineering, transport, monitoring — be competitively tendered rather than absorbed into a single-operator block grant. Keep does not mean exempt from review.
• Transition mechanism: None on classification. Operating review as noted.
• Affected groups: None adversely.

Ellenőrzési és információs célú önkormányzati társulások támogatása (Support for monitoring and information-purpose local-government associations)

• Current allocation: 1,498.6 millió Ft (operating)

• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)

• Rationale: This line is statutorily distinct from the rest of the chapter and warrants the chapter’s one genuinely contestable classification. Under the atomic energy law, associations of municipalities located near a repository or a planned repository receive support from the Fund.⁴ The stated purpose is ellenőrzés és információ — monitoring and information. The honest description of the mechanism: it is a transfer from the Fund to the local authorities of the host and neighbouring settlements of Bátaapáti and the Boda site-selection area, channelled through municipal associations whose existence is itself created by the transfer.

  Two functions are bundled in this line, and they classify differently. The genuine function is independent monitoring — local capacity to verify that a repository in one’s own community is operating safely is a real rights-protection interest of the residents who live with the hazard, and it is not obvious that the operator’s own monitoring or the national regulator’s monitoring fully substitutes for community-level verification. The other function is, in substance, a side-payment: a transfer to host municipalities that buys local political acquiescence to siting a facility nobody wants next door. The second function concentrates benefit on an organised, geographically defined constituency — the host municipalities — while the cost is spread across the operator levy and ultimately across electricity consumers. The host municipalities have a structural interest in the transfer’s continuation independent of whether the monitoring it nominally funds is being performed; the társulás form gives that interest an institutional voice.

  The framework’s reading: the verification function is real and should be retained, but at its actual cost, which is a fraction of 1,498.6 millió Ft — independent environmental and radiological monitoring of two repository sites is a contained technical activity. The residual is a siting side-payment, and a siting side-payment is a discretionary transfer rather than a rights-protection function. The Phase-Out reduces the line over three years to the audited cost of genuine independent monitoring, retained as a residual; the acquiescence-payment component is wound down.

• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over three budget cycles. Mechanism: linear. The protected party is the host and neighbouring municipalities, which have planned local budgets around the transfer; an abrupt cut would force in-year municipal budget holes. A three-year linear glide gives those councils time to adjust service planning. In parallel, year 1 commissions an independent audit establishing the true cost of genuine radiological and environmental monitoring at the two sites; that audited figure becomes the retained residual from year 4 onward (modelled here at approximately one-third of the current line — 500 millió Ft — pending the audit; the schedule’s steady-state saving is the acquiescence-payment component, the remainder). The funding source of the bridge is the Fund itself, which already carries the line; no new money is required.

• Affected groups: The municipalities of the Bátaapáti host region and the Boda/Baranya site-selection area — a small number of councils whose own-source budgets include this transfer. The disruption is a municipal-budget planning matter, not a household-income matter: no resident loses a personal entitlement, and the genuine monitoring their community relies on for safety verification is explicitly retained. The three-year horizon exists to honour municipal-budget reliance, not because the side-payment has any enduring rationale.

Revenue Items

The revenue side of this chapter is unusual and important: the Fund’s revenue (89,557.8 millió Ft) exceeds its expenditure (42,258.1 millió Ft) by design, because the Fund accumulates against liabilities — full decommissioning of the Paks reactors, deep geological disposal of high-level waste — that fall due decades hence. A surplus here is not slack; it is provisioning.

Nukleáris létesítmények befizetései (Payments by nuclear installations)

• Current yield: 35,580.0 millió Ft
• Type: Charge (statutory operator levy — polluter-pays contribution)
• Notes: This is the core polluter-pays revenue. Under the 1996 atomic energy law, the operator of a nuclear installation — overwhelmingly the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, with smaller contributions from the research and teaching reactors and isotope users — is statutorily obliged to fund the back-end costs of its activity through payments into the Fund.¹ This is the revenue line the framework most strongly endorses: it is not a tax in the ordinary sense but a compelled internalisation of a cost the operator would otherwise externalise onto future taxpayers. The compulsion is justified precisely because the harm is involuntary and irreversible and the cost would otherwise be displaced onto parties who cannot consent. Note the structural point for the whitepaper: this is what it looks like when the state forces a cost-creator to bear its own cost rather than subsidising the activity — the opposite of the soft-budget pattern that recurs across the SOE chapters.

Költségvetési támogatás (Budget support)

• Current yield: 53,974.7 millió Ft

• Type: Other (central-budget value-preservation transfer)

• Notes: This is the largest revenue line in the chapter and the one whose label most invites misreading. Költségvetési támogatás reads as a state subsidy of nuclear-waste management — general taxpayers funding the nuclear industry’s costs. That reading is wrong, and the distinction matters for the classification logic of the whole chapter. The transfer is a value-preservation mechanism: the atomic energy law requires that the Fund’s accumulated balance retain its real value, because the liabilities it provisions for fall due decades in the future. To that end the central budget pays the Fund an amount calculated by applying the previous year’s average central-bank base rate to the Fund’s average balance.⁵ In effect the state pays the Fund interest on the accumulated provision, in lieu of the Fund holding its reserve in market instruments. The practice was suspended in 2001–2002 and resumed from 2003.⁵

  The economic substance: the Fund’s operator contributions, paid in over decades, must be worth as much in real terms when decommissioning falls due as when they were paid. A private decommissioning fund would achieve this by investing its reserve in interest-bearing or return-generating assets. The Hungarian arrangement instead has the Fund’s reserve effectively held by the state, with the state crediting a base-rate return. This is not a subsidy of nuclear operations — it is the inflation-and-time-value compensation on the operator’s own pre-paid money. The honest classification consequence: it does not weaken the polluter-pays character of the chapter, because it is not general revenue topping up an under-funded operator obligation; it is the return on operator money the state is holding.

  One genuine question the framework would press, flagged rather than resolved here because the budget data does not settle it: a base-rate-indexed return is an administered return, not a market return. Whether base rate is the right value-preservation benchmark — whether it over- or under-compensates relative to what a diversified reserve portfolio would have earned over the relevant horizon — is a question the Hungarian academic literature on the Fund’s discount rate has examined directly,⁶ and it has real fiscal consequences in both directions. If base rate over-compensates, general revenue is subsidising the Fund; if it under-compensates, the Fund will be short when decommissioning falls due and general revenue will face the gap later. The framework’s recommendation is not to cut this line — the value-preservation function is sound — but to make the benchmark explicit and reviewed, ideally against the return a ring-fenced, independently-managed reserve portfolio would have generated.

Radioaktív hulladékok végleges, eseti elhelyezése (Final, ad-hoc disposal of radioactive waste)

• Current yield: 3.1 millió Ft
• Type: Fee
• Notes: A negligible fee line — charges for one-off disposal of radioactive waste from sources outside the standard operator contributions (institutional users, decommissioned medical or industrial sources). The amount is immaterial. It is a user fee for a disposal service actually rendered — the cleanest possible revenue form, the user paying the cost — and would simply continue at whatever level demand for ad-hoc disposal generates.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	0	0
Phase-Out	1	1,498.6
Nominal Freeze	0	0
Keep	6	40,759.5
Total	6	42,258.1

Note: the Alapkezelőnek működési célra line (83.5 millió Ft — operating funds for the Fund’s administrator, the Országos Atomenergia Hivatal) is included within the Keep total. It is a de minimis administrative line funding the statutory fund-management function; classified Keep with the rest of the operating apparatus and not given a separate analytical section as the classification is obvious from the mechanism. The six Keep items (8,896.5 + 1,738.5 + 18,909.8 + 135.6 + 10,995.6 + 83.5 = 40,759.5 millió Ft) plus the one Phase-Out item (1,498.6 millió Ft) reconcile to the chapter total of 42,258.1 millió Ft.

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Nukleáris létesítmények befizetései	35,580.0
Költségvetési támogatás	53,974.7
Radioaktív hulladékok végleges, eseti elhelyezése	3.1
Total chapter revenue	89,557.8

Key Observations

• This is the polluter-pays principle working as designed. Chapter LXVI is the structural opposite of the soft-budget-constraint pattern that recurs across the state-owned-enterprise chapters. Here the entity that creates an irreversible hazard is statutorily compelled to pre-fund its remediation, the money is ring-fenced from the rest of the budget, and a planned surplus accumulates against liabilities that fall due decades hence. The framework keeps this. The Fund’s existence is not the problem; it is the model.

• The risk in nuclear-waste finance runs toward under-provision, not over-provision. The failure mode the framework would warn against is a fund that looks generous today and is empty when the Paks reactors reach decommissioning. A surplus on this chapter is not slack to be reclaimed — it is provisioning, and the honest classification of almost every line is Keep precisely because the irreversible terminal cost is real and the alternative to pre-funding it is displacing it onto a future generation that consumed none of the electricity.

• “Költségvetési támogatás” is a label that misdescribes its mechanism. The 53,974.7 millió Ft line is not a general-revenue subsidy of the nuclear industry. It is a base-rate-indexed value- preservation return on operator money the state holds — the time-value compensation on the industry’s own pre-paid contributions. Reading it as a subsidy would wrongly suggest the polluter-pays character of the chapter is compromised; it is not. The legitimate question is narrower: an administered base-rate return is not a market return, and whether it is the correct value-preservation benchmark has fiscal consequences in both directions. Make the benchmark explicit and review it; do not cut the function.

• The single contestable line is the local-government transfer. Item 6 — support for monitoring and information-purpose municipal associations — bundles a genuine rights-protection function (community-level safety verification, which residents living with the hazard have a real interest in) with a siting side-payment that buys host-municipality acquiescence. The first is kept at its audited cost; the second is a discretionary transfer to a geographically organised constituency and is phased out over three years. This is the chapter’s one case where the analyst’s judgement, not the mechanism alone, carries the classification — and where the discipline of separating the real function from the rent attached to it does the analytical work.

• RHK Kft. is a single-operator monopoly with no competitive price signal. The function — running the repositories and the spent-fuel store — is kept. But 10,995.6 millió Ft of operating cost is set by a state-owned monopoly with no market benchmark telling whether that is the efficient figure. Keep does not mean exempt from review: cost-per-cubic-metre of disposal is internationally comparable, and discrete work packages can be tendered. The recommendation is a cost benchmark, not a classification change.

Sources

Footnotes

1. 1996. évi CXVI. törvény az atomenergiáról (Act CXVI of 1996 on Atomic Energy). Nemzeti Jogszabálytár / Hatályos Jogszabályok Gyűjteménye. https://net.jogtar.hu/jogszabaly?docid=99600116.tv. The Act establishes the Központi Nukleáris Pénzügyi Alap as a separated state fund and assigns to nuclear-facility operators the obligation to fund back-end costs (waste disposal, spent-fuel storage, fuel-cycle closure, decommissioning) through payments into the Fund.
   ↩ ↩²

2. “10 éves a KNPA és az RHK Kft.” Országos Atomenergia Hivatal (Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority). https://www.haea.hu/web/v3/OAHportal.nsf/web?OpenAgent=&article=news&uid=C1257BDB00510532C12574830026DEB5. The KNPA was established on 1 January 1998; RHK Kft. prepares the medium- and long-term plan and the annual work programmes for the use of the Fund. ↩

3. Máthé Zoltán et al. “Application of a CNN to the Boda Claystone Formation for high-level radioactive waste disposal.” Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group). 2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31564-1. Peer-reviewed study confirming the Boda Claystone Formation in the West-Mecsek mountains, Baranya county, southern Hungary, as the candidate host rock under investigation by PURAM (now RHK Kft.) for Hungary’s deep geological repository for high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel. See also: RHK Kft., “Az RHK Kft. huszonharmadik közép és hosszú távú terve.” https://rhk.hu/storage/2055/Az-RHK-Kft.-huszonharmadik-kozep-es-hosszu-tavu-terve.pdf. Programme documentation from RHK Kft. confirming the ongoing Boda site-characterisation programme. ↩

4. 1996. évi CXVI. törvény az atomenergiáról, 10/A. § (2). Nemzeti Jogszabálytár / Hatályos Jogszabályok Gyűjteménye. https://net.jogtar.hu/jogszabaly?docid=99600116.tv. “A társulásoknak a tárolóhoz vagy a tervezett tárolóhoz kötötten a Központi Nukleáris Pénzügyi Alapból támogatás adható.” (Support from the Central Nuclear Financial Fund may be provided to associations connected to a repository or a planned repository.)
   ↩

5. “Finanszírozás.” RHK Kft. (Radioaktív Hulladékokat Kezelő Kft.). https://rhk.hu/finanszirozas. The Fund receives a central-budget transfer to preserve its real value: “Az Alap az értékállóságának biztosítása érdekében … központi költségvetési támogatásban részesül.” The transfer is calculated by applying the previous year’s average central-bank base rate to the Fund’s average balance; the practice was suspended in 2001–2002 and resumed from 2003. ↩ ↩²

6. Felsmann Balázs – Mezősi András. “A diszkontráta hatása a Központi Nukleáris Pénzügyi Alap hosszú távú egyenlegére.” KRTK Közgazdaság-tudományi Intézet. https://kti.krtk.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/09_FelsmannB-MezosiA.pdf. Academic analysis of how the assumed discount/return rate affects the long-run adequacy of the Central Nuclear Financial Fund’s balance — the basis for the observation that the value-preservation benchmark has fiscal consequences in both directions. ↩