Danube Drops, Hungary Shuts Paks Nuclear Plant for First Time
The outage has disrupted nearly half of national power supply, prompting planned savings, imports and backup generation.
Hungary will fully shut down the Paks nuclear plant after the Danube River fell to a level that no longer provides enough cooling water for the reactors. The shutdown, which began on 3 August, is the first total stoppage in 44 years of operation at the plant, which has a capacity of about 2.000 megawatts. In recent days, output at Paks has dropped sharply from 965 megawatts to about 240 megawatts. The plant supplies nearly half of the country's electricity needs. The government has also imposed water-use restrictions in more than 100 cities and villages, prepared electricity imports and opened the option of reducing consumption for large industrial users amid an extreme heat wave and prolonged drought in Europe.