Hungarian authorities are sinking two barges and building a riverbed sill in the Danube River to raise water levels and avert a shutdown at the Paks nuclear plant, as historic drought pushes the facility to operate at a fraction of its capacity amidst rising Central European water scarcity.
Persistent drought and severe summer heat waves have battered major waterways across Central and Eastern Europe, leaving governments scrambling to protect vital energy infrastructure. In Hungary, authorities are moving to sink two barges in the Danube near the country’s sole nuclear facility to help keep the facility operating and avoid a costly full shutdown.
Emergency Interventions at the Paks Nuclear Plant
The Soviet-built Paks nuclear power plant relies on water drawn from the Danube to cool its four reactors. Persistent drought and successive extreme heat waves in recent months have deprived the river of water, bringing levels to record lows and pushing the facility to the brink of shutting down for the first time in its 44-year history.
Prime Minister Péter Magyar outlined the emergency engineering efforts in social media updates, noting that the plant was operating at a severely reduced capacity. Hungary was forced to cut its 2-gigawatt Paks nuclear plant’s output to just over 10% earlier in the month before recovering slightly to draw around 25% of its total capacity.
“The Danube is receding…The controlled sinking of the barges will begin shortly,”
Photo: Yahoo
Peter Magyar, Prime Minister
Workers began deploying heavy material near the site, with about 5,000 metric tons of stone arriving to construct an underwater barrier designed to slow the river current and raise the water level available for cooling pumps. While the government planned a more permanent bed sill—a submerged, dam-like structure built into the river channel—to manage water flow over the long term, officials stressed that immediate measures were required to buy time.
Magyar noted that the Danube has given us days, not months, pointing out that operating the Paks plant at its current restricted output costs the Hungarian economy up to 50 billion forints ($158 million) per month. By contrast, the planned interventions on the river carry a price tag of around 6 billion forints ($19 million).
Regional Vulnerabilities Across Central European Rivers
The crisis at Paks is part of a broader regional vulnerability tied to how atomic energy interacts with an increasingly volatile climate. Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, a professor at the Central European University in Vienna, explained that scientific modelling points to a drying trend across Central Eastern Europe.
Photo: NBC News
“This is not only due to less rains, but because the soil moisture and in the groundwater levels have dropped over the past years, and less precipitation and more heatwaves exacerbate soil drying,”
Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, professor at the Central European University in Vienna
Neighboring Romania faced a crisis when authorities shut down its last working reactor at the Cernavoda nuclear plant after cooling water efforts proved insufficient. Romania’s state-owned Nuclearelectrica operates two 706-megawatt reactors accounting for a fifth of the country’s power production using Canadian CANDU technology that relies on heavy water.
To address recurring low-water challenges, Romania approved a project worth 1.02 billion lei ($225 million) in 2024 to lift the riverbed of the Bala branch—a river branch where the plant sits—to better manage water flow. However, that project has faced delays, forcing Romanian authorities to take emergency measures last week by sinking four rock-laden barges into the Danube to redirect flow.
Design Limitations and Future Adaptations for Atomic Energy
The reliance on river cooling systems has sparked fresh debates among nuclear experts and engineers about whether older plants can be retrofitted or if future expansions must adopt alternative technologies. Unlike the systems used in Hungary and Romania, nuclear plants in the Czech Republic and Slovakia utilize wet cooling towers that evaporate steam into the atmosphere and require less river water.
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“I don’t think that for the remaining twenty-plus years I mean, the remaining lifetime of the Paks 1 power plant, it would be economical to install a large cooling tower,”
Attila Aszodi, professor and nuclear expert at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics
