AUSTRIAN POSITION ON PAKS LIFE EXTENSION
According to Hungarian Law, an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) must be performed prior to granting a lifetime extension of an additional 20 years for all four units at the Paks nuclear power plant. The Hungarian EIA is a two-stage process, with a preliminary and a detailed stage. As requested by the Austrian Government, Hungary has submitted documentation for the first stage of the EIA process. An experts team including the Austrian Institute of Applied Ecology elaborated a comment on the preliminary EIA study. [ Report to the Austrian Government - EIA procedure for the lifetime extension of Paks NPP, Statement on the Preliminary Impact Assessment Study – Umweltbundesamt, Vienna 2005]
The REPORT concerned legal questions, foremost to what extent the EIA documentation has to deal with accident scenarios, which could affect Austrian territory and technical questions, mainly the reduction of safety margins due to Life Extension and power upgrade. The arguments of the Austrian position are valid for all neighbouring countries and could support also NGOs who want to take a position to this EIA process.
The REPORT confirms that from a legal point of view it is not justified to consider exclusively design base accidents and involve only municipalities in the neighborhood of the NPP (30 km radius).
Based on a review of international treaties, conventions and EU law, the following conclusion about the legal aspects can be summarized:
- The case of the extension of the operating time of the nuclear power plant Paks is covered by the application scope of the EIA-Directive respectively the ESPOO-Convention.
- The position of the Hungarian authorities on to the question of whether their neighbouring states are likely to be significantly affected, which only takes into account the probability of the occurrence of design base accidents while at the same time excluding severe accidents (beyond design basis accidents) is not in line with the ESPOO-Convention and the EIA-Directive.
