Hungary Shuts Down Paks Plant as Danube Hits Record Low

Hungary has been left without its only nuclear power plant, and the cause is not a fault at the facility but a river that flows a few hundred kilometers downstream through Serbia. The Danube’s water level at Paks dropped to minus 144 centimeters, well below the previous record low of minus 98 centimeters set in 2018, leaving the plant’s pumps unable to draw enough water to cool the reactors. For Serbia this is not distant news: the same drought that pushed down the Hungarian stretch of the river also lowered our own section, as we reported when Danube pumping stations were left without sufficient depth, and Budapest is now entering the regional electricity market in the middle of August as a major buyer.

Prime Minister Peter Magyar announced the decision on Sunday, August 2, in a video address ahead of the hottest days.

“Tomorrow the Paks plant will not produce electricity, and the hottest days, with 40 degrees, are still ahead of us,” Magyar said, asking businesses and households to cut back or shift their consumption into the evening hours.

Paks went into operation in 1982 and had never been fully shut down in its 44 years of existence.

Why does a low river shut down a reactor?

The plant’s four Soviet built reactors south of Budapest have a combined capacity of about 2,000 megawatts and cover close to 40 percent of Hungary’s electricity output. The facility draws its cooling water directly from the Danube, and the threshold at which it must shut down is minus 134 centimeters, since below that point the intake pumps cannot pull in the volume they need. The river broke through that threshold and kept falling.

The drop was fast. On Friday, Paks was still producing 965 megawatts. Overnight, output fell to 240 megawatts, and by Sunday afternoon only unit two was still running. Shut down reactors use far less water and are kept in a safe state through backup systems, so the halt in production is an energy event, not a safety one.

Hungarian Minister of Economy and Energy Istvan Kapitany said a new low water pumping station, worth about 10 billion forints, could have prevented the shutdown, and ordered a review of why it was never built.

Lights off, water restricted

The government asked citizens to cut consumption between 5 and 10 p.m., and large industrial consumers voluntarily gave up between 400 and 500 megawatts. The biggest commitments came from MOL Petrochemicals with 63 megawatts, the Samsung SDI battery plant in Göd with 32.8 megawatts, the state railway infrastructure operator with 22.5 megawatts, and SK On Hungary and Audi Hungaria with 22 megawatts each.

In Budapest, decorative lighting was switched off on more than 300 buildings, bridges and monuments, including the musical fountain on Margaret Island. More than 100 Hungarian towns and villages were placed under water use restrictions.

The hardest hit is Paks itself, a town of 17,000, which drew its heating and hot water from the plant. After the full shutdown, about 6,000 people in 2,771 apartments and 181 public institutions were left without hot water, so the municipality is installing electric boilers, opening public baths and bringing in shower containers.

Austria breaks records at the same time

While Hungary was shutting down reactors, Austria broke its national temperature record two days in a row. Bad Deutsch-Altenburg in Lower Austria recorded 41.2 degrees on Wednesday, August 5, a day after Vienna’s Stammersdorf district logged 41 degrees. The previous Austrian maximum of 40.5 degrees had been held by that same location since August 2013.

The night was just as unusual. In Hornstein, in Burgenland, the temperature never dropped below 28.5 degrees, the warmest night in the history of Austrian measurements. Six of the country’s nine provincial capitals recorded a tropical night, with Linz and Eisenstadt both at 23 degrees. A forest fire is burning in Burgenland, and Vienna’s Lobau area is under the highest fire danger level.

The bill lands on the regional market

Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orban opened talks on emergency electricity imports with Austria, Slovakia and Germany, and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico offered assistance, saying a crisis of this scale had not been seen before. At the same time, Romania shut down both reactors at Cernavoda, which normally supply about a fifth of the country’s electricity.

There is also a part of this story that goes beyond the drought. The expansion of Paks, a 12.5 billion euro contract awarded to Russia’s Rosatom without an open tender in 2014, was for years a symbol of Viktor Orban’s relationship with Moscow, and it was never completed. After his election defeat in April, Orban admitted that the long delay of Paks 2 was a serious failure of his government, while Magyar argues that losing the old units would be far easier to bear if the two new ones were running. Fidesz parliamentary group leader Janos Boka rejects the attempt to shift blame and points out that water level forecasts had been unfavorable for months.

For the region, the consequence is measurable even before anyone settles who is to blame. When two countries on the Danube lose their nuclear plants in the same week and start buying on a market that Serbia also relies on, the price of electricity in August moves in only one direction. The Hungarian government still treats cutting off households as a last resort, but analysts warn that a prolonged shortfall would lead to rolling blackouts lasting one to three hours by neighborhood.

Acting head of state and speaker of parliament Agnes Forsthofer summoned the prime minister to an emergency briefing on Monday morning, together with the leaders of all parliamentary groups. The answer to how long Paks will stay offline is not being given by the government or the opposition, but by the water level of the Danube.