Low Danube Forces Full Halt of Romania’s Sole Nuclear Plant
(Bloomberg) -- Romania shut down its sole nuclear plant while Hungary is trying to salvage the operation of its own facility as a persistent drought curbs Danube river flows and hampers the cooling of reactors.
Authorities in Bucharest took the second reactor at the Cernavoda plant offline on Thursday, according to a live tracker by power-grid operator Transelectrica. It’s the first time since 2003 that drought forced the 1,400 megawatt facility to be fully halted.
Scorching heat waves and a near total absence of precipitation are drying up lakes and rivers, snarling waterway traffic and stretching power grids across Europe. The strain on electricity is particularly acute in the continent’s east.
In Hungary, authorities are lining up two 80-meter long (262 feet) barges to sink them if needed to raise the Danube water level at the 2,000 megawatt Paks nuclear plant. Similarly, Romania sank four barges last week and even detonated a rock formation on the Danube with hopes to avoid its plant’s full shutdown.
Hungary is also deploying soldiers to build a ground sill on the riverbed to deal with the conditions that forced the shutdown of three of Paks’ four nuclear reactors. The move may raise water levels within weeks, Prime Minister Peter Magyar said on Wednesday.
Paks accounts for about 40% of Hungary’s power generation while Cernavoda produces about 20% of Romania’s electricity. Both countries are relying mostly on solar energy and power imports to compensate for the outages.
Slovenia’s Krsko nuclear power plant has been operating at 80% of capacity since last week due to the low water levels and high temperatures of the Sava River, a tributary of the Danube.
It’s not just nuclear plants that are affected.
In the Slovak capital of Bratislava, roughly half as many vessels were docked as the previous week, when more than a dozen of them were unable to continue to either Vienna or Budapest. While conditions have since slightly improved upriver, the low water levels continue to block the passage of larger vessels south toward Hungary, according to local authorities.
(Recasts with full shutdown of Romanian nuclear plant, adds Slovenia and Slovakia in last two paragraphs.)
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