BUDAPEST, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Hungarian authorities will sink two barges in the Danube on Saturday to raise the water level at the Paks nuclear plant to avert a shutdown of one of its last two remaining turbines, as water levels are dropping, Prime Minister Peter Magyar said.
The plant currently operates at around 25% of its capacity due to a historic drought and record low water levels on the Danube river, from which the nuclear plant draws its coolant.
Magyar said in a Facebook post that current forecasts indicated the water level would drop to the critical level by early Monday morning at which point one of the two operating turbines would have to be shut down.
“The Danube is receding…The controlled sinking of the barges will begin shortly,” he said.
Hungary’s government said on Wednesday that it would build a riverbed “sill”, a submerged, dam-like structure built crosswise on the bottom of a river channel, to manage water flow. That will take weeks.
It also said that two 80-metre (260-foot) barges would be submerged near the nuclear plant to raise the water level in the short term so that the plant’s two turbines could continue working while the riverbed sill was under construction.
Neighbouring Romania shut down its last working reactor on Thursday due to the low level of the Danube. The drought also raised questions in Hungary and Romania about how to adapt atomic energy to an increasingly extreme climate.
(Reporting by Krisztina Than; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
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