Hungary for ESS

Economic conditions, socio-economic impact

There are several reasons to support that even though more than one country has applied to host the project, building the ESS in Hungary probably serves the best the implementation of the EU’s global and regional development goals the most. One important reason is the possibility of saving financial resources due to the development status of the Hungarian location. The local workforce is highly qualified and much cheaper than in most EU countries. The high level of development of the nuclear industry offers an efficient safety and regulatory environment. The investment-friendly legal and licensing environment has already attracted major foreign industrial investments. Actual construction can be started within 24 months after the initiation of the licensing procedure. These factors make Hungary the ESS site candidate offering the most favorable conditions.

Building ESS in Hungary will guarantee the largest socio-economic impact for the project in terms of reaching both global and regional development goals of the European Union. This goes hand in hand with the large savings that a Hungarian site can offer due to the country’s development status. A particular aspect in this situation is the necessity to pay workers from countries of the Western part of the EU typically 4-5 times higher salaries than their local colleagues doing the same job in other enterprises. This is a well-established and accepted necessity and standard practice at the large number of multinational or foreign-owned companies in Hungary (and other new EU member countries). At the same time, this practice will allow the ESS to hire a planned 90 percent of its professional staff as expatriates from the most developed countries by offering most attractive salaries on the scale in their home country. In order to make this possible and also to help hiring a larger than nowadays usual team, important savings will be realized by outsourcing services in a competitive manner equivalent to about 200 supporting staff. In the low wage local environment the creation of a number of high-wage job opportunities by ESS will have a highly multiplied secondary effect on the job market, helping to also advance cohesion within the EU.
Technically, Hungary affords a highly experienced professional background in handling radioactive technologies, materials and related environmental issues: nearly 40 percent of the Hungarian electricity production is nuclear, plans to add to the nuclear energy production capacity advance on schedule and the country has conducted substantial Uranium mining operations and related environmental remediation.
The Hungarian legislation and judiciary conforms fully by now to EU standards and major attention is paid to translate this into everyday practice. According to the official position of the Hungarian Atomic Energy Agency, the national nuclear safety authority, the ESS is not classified as a nuclear facility. Hungary has developed legislation to put all licensing processes for national priority projects on a fast track, the latest example of its use being a new 850 M€ Mercedes car production plant. This legal facility will allow ESS to start actual construction work within 24 months after opening the licensing procedure.

The projected construction costs of the ESS in Hungary have been established with a conservative methodology and results are validated by the good agreement with cost estimates made in other countries (including the evaluation based on the actual construction costs of the similar, recently completed SNS facility at Oak Ridge), if differences in costs for local contractor services are taken into account on the basis of international Price Level Index databases.