Central Nuclear Financial Fund

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.

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.

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.

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 county — 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.

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. 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.

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.