If the right to pay extra for better lenses and casts must be defined in primary legislation, then so should the tax that we will be required to pay to fund the construction of Temelín 3&4.

Jiří Rusnok has indicated that his government would not 'decide on Temelín'. If by 'decide' is meant select a winner, this is likely to be true, and not only for the reason being offered by Rusnok –that the decision is too important to be taken by an unelected government (of self-appointed experts like himself).

Someone has to pay. And it won’t be ČEZ. Rusnok, as a former finance minister, well understands this. And unless and until the problem of how to pay for the construction of new nuclear reactors is resolved, there will be none, regardless of who governs this country, elected or otherwise, and regardless of which technology, Russian, French or American, the government prefers.

And here a comparison with the procurement of supersonic fighters is helpful. Readers will recall that prime minister Zeman tried to buy 24 new Gripen aircraft in 2002, and was thwarted by the lower house of parliament (his successor, Vladimír Špidla, ended up leasing 14 aircraft for ten years, at a fraction of the cost).

The bill to authorize a state guarantee of the loan to fund the purchase of the new aircraft was lost by just one vote, on 13 June 2002. (see the voting record here) The voting record shows that all ODS MPs voted against the bill, including the party chairman, Václav Klaus, who had earlier tried and failed to persuade his parliamentary party colleagues in private to support the bill. His principal antagonist in ODS on Gripen was Petr Nečas, and it is Nečas we can thank for the fact that Klaus was overruled.

There were vast sums of money riding on that 13 June 2002 vote, and not only the multimillion dollar commission that would have been won by Richard Háva, the middleman on the deal. We shall never know whether, how much and to whom money was promised in exchange for a ‘Yes’ vote. We cannot assume that all or indeed any of those who voted ‘Yes’ that day were bribed. And nor can we assume that those who voted ‘No’ were not. But it is clear that it would have been suicidal for Klaus to go against his party colleagues.

State funding of Temelín will require parliamentary approval as well. But this time, the government is hoping to be more cunning. There will be no attention-grabbing “Bill on the funding of two nuclear reactors at Temelín” presented to parliament. Instead, parliament will be asked to vote on an innocuous sounding ‘Bill on the support of energy sources’ (Vl. návrh zák. o podporovaných zdrojích energie).

And what is more cunning still, the bill itself will barely mention the word ‘nuclear’, and it will not mention the word ‘Temelín’ at all. But what is most cunning is that the actual amount of funding for the construction of two new nuclear reactors at Temelín will be specified in a subsequent decree, thereby dispensing altogether with the need for parliamentary scrutiny and approval. No one will even notice if we're lucky!

The newspapers today are full of the decision by the Constitutional Court to strike down the so-called ‘above standard’ payments in healthcare, on the grounds that such types of care must be defined in law, not merely by decree.

If the right to pay extra for better lenses and casts must be defined in primary legislation, then perhaps so should the tax that taxpayers will be required to pay to fund the construction of Temelín 3&4, if only to persuade investors to invest in what would otherwise be a commercial disaster. Investors need the certainty that they will get their money back, and an executive decree does not provide that certainty.

And this brings us back to Rusnok and his announcement that he would not ‘decide on Temelín’. Indeed. But he will try to have parliament pass the Bill on the support of energy sources (in its current version, the bill is due to come into force in January 2014). And then his minister of industry & trade will merely issue a decree specifying how large the subsidy needs to be to fund the investment at Temelín.