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.
Meanwhile, Hungary's government is planning to build a riverbed structure in the Danube River, in a bid to raise water levels enough to keep that country's only nuclear power plant online.
Bloomberg reports that authorities in Bucharest took the second reactor at the Cernavoda plant offline on August 13, 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.
According to the Associated Press, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar laid out plans on August 12 to build a concrete structure in the river known as a bed sill, which would help slow the Danube's current and potentially raise water levels by as much as three feet. Hungary's Soviet-era nuclear plant uses water from the Danube to cool its four reactors, but because of recent summer heat waves that have water levels at all time lows, the facility is operating at just over 10% of its total capacity.
The bed sill will require 145,000 cubic meters of rock, with work beginning on the evening of August 12. On August 14, Magyar is expected to decide on whether to also sink two large barges near the power plant's cooling pumps, which could raise the river by another 8 inches.
The shutdown of Romania's Nuclearelectrica power plant comes despite the government's drastic intervention, including blasting a rock obstruction out of the water, dredging the riverbed and sinking barges full of rocks into the river, Reuters reports. Romania has a state of emergency in effect through the end of August, and has asked companies and households to voluntarily reduce power consumption during peak hours.
