Paks to benefit from his project management experience

Attila Nagy spent his early childhood in Kazincbarcika, or more precisely in Berente, which has since become an independent town. the Paks II. Zrt. programme element manager, who is a technical manager, engineering teacher, mechanical engineer, and more than twenty years of experience as an investor and project manager. He previously lived and worked in several Hungarian industrial cities that were similar to Paks in many respects.

Thanks to BorsodChem, Berente became one of the richest settlements in the country, but living conditions were not very good. "It was good to work there, but not to live. My parents decided that the air in the Sajó valley was not clean enough, especially at that time, so they decided to move the family to Százhalombatta. My father made a good and brave decision", he says.

The Dunai Kőolajipari Vállalat - the predecessor of MOL - was looking for employees for the refinery under construction in százhalombatta. The family moved to the Transdanubian town in the summer of 1986, Attila started primary school there and still lives there with his family, although he has made a short detour to Tiszaújváros. "It's a small town where you can live in peace and quiet, but it still offers a lot of opportunities" - is how he describes Százhalombatta. "What is not available locally can be found in Budapest, which is easily accessible. You can feel the energy in the town," he says, adding that it is very similar to Paks for all these reasons.

Returning to his journey, he recalls that after Vörösmarty Mihály Gymnasium in Érd, then Bánki Donát Technical College (now Óbuda University), he started working for a German-based company in trade, warehousing and logistics, and then became a project manager for a company producing amusement park toys and shipping them to all five continents of the world. After that, he started working as a technical inspector in an engineering office, which, as he puts it, is how he entered the field of the MOL Danube Refinery. "I haven't become a MOL yet, but it was an important step in that direction. As a child, I was part of the MOL family, and it was my ambition to work for this strategic company, just like my parents" he says.

Soon he took another step towards his goal when he said yes to the call of Petrolszolg Kft., a maintenance company. Shortly afterwards, the coveted moment arrived, when he was called to the Investment Department of MOL in response to an application he had submitted earlier, and of course he said yes. "A professional, well-organised company with a good livelihood, one of the driving forces of the Hungarian economy, where the value creation and the importance of our work is tangible" - is how he describes the company where he has spent sixteen years, taking part in increasingly significant projects. In 2013, he was assigned to a project in Tiszaújváros.

"It is every project manager's dream to see a project through from the germ of an idea to its implementation."

Attila Nagy had the opportunity to do this with this Hungarian-Japanese project. During the most intensive period, he and his family moved to Tiszaújváros, and then back to the parent company in Százhalombatta. After a few years, when he felt that he had reached the peak of his career and that perhaps it was time for a change, an opportunity "came his way". A chance to join an even bigger project, the construction of a new nuclear power plant. "I'm highly motivated by the fact that we're still in the planning stage, starting the earthworks, and from there we'll have to get to commissioning. The fact that it was a nuclear power plant was both mysterious to me and very attractive in terms of its complexity and timeframe compared to my previous work."

Attila Nagy will be working as a programme element officer at the Paks II Nuclear Power Plant Zrt. from December 2023. At first he didn't know which programme element he would be responsible for, but when it turned out to include the facilities of the Block 5 nuclear island, he took a deep breath.

"I don't want to diminish the merits of the other programme elements and the people who work on them, but for me this is the ace that carries it all, because the nuclear island is the soul of the nuclear power plant. It's where the reactor hall and six other key buildings will be."