Overview
- Romania began sinking four rock-filled barges into the Danube on Thursday to redirect flow toward the Cernavoda nuclear plant after earlier blasting and dredging efforts, a move officials say could extend the plant’s operation from about five to six days to roughly nine to ten days if it succeeds.
- Hungary has taken three of Paks’s four reactors offline and is running the remaining unit at reduced power because the plant’s river intakes cannot reach the shrunken Danube, and the government has sharply increased electricity imports and urged household and industrial conservation.
- Low flows have narrowed navigation channels across the basin, forcing cargo ships to reduce loads, suspending ferries and cruises, stranding local fishing and tourism businesses and exposing WWII shipwrecks and prehistoric bones that pose safety and heritage risks.
- Governments are using improvised engineering fixes, plant output cuts, cross-border power transfers and demand measures to avoid blackouts, while scientists link the severity of the drought to human-caused climate change and warn of repeated strain on water‑cooled generation.
- The crisis highlights longer-term needs such as deeper cooling intakes, alternative cooling systems, more storage and grid links, coordinated river management and investment in resilience to prevent future multi-country energy and transport shocks.