The legislative bill to allow the state to oblige households to pay for Temelín will be presented to parliament this autumn.

Whoever governs this country and whichever technology is chosen, someone has to pay for doubling the size of Temelín. And it won’t be ČEZ.

It will be Czech households. Public funding of the project requires parliamentary approval. In the next three months, the draft law allowing the state to oblige Czech households to fund the construction of two new blocs at Temelín will be presented to parliament.

In its current version, the Bill on the support of energy sources (Vl. návrh zák. o podporovaných zdrojích energie) is due to come into force in January 2014. The draft law does not mention the word ‘Temelín’, and it barely mentions the word ‘nuclear’.

But what is most duplicitous of all is that the bill allows the actual size of the required public subsidy to be set by government decree, thereby dispensing with the need for parliamentary scrutiny.

We live in a country in which a specific type of health care, for which individuals have the right to pay extra, requires parliamentary approval, whilst the tax households shall be obliged to pay to fund the construction of nuclear reactors does not.