Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar said the country will face its most tense period in the energy sector amid the near-total shutdown of Hungary’s only nuclear power plant, Paks. The cause is the record-low water level of the Danube, which has left the plant without a sufficient volume of cooling water.
According to Magyar, over the next five critical days the power system will come under severe strain. This coincides with expected extreme heat, with temperatures approaching 40 °C, and rising electricity consumption during evening peak hours (roughly 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.). By Sunday, 2 August 2026, the Paks nuclear power plant (four units with a total capacity of about 2,000 MW, which normally supply a significant share of Hungary’s electricity generation) was operating at only a fraction of its capacity; a full shutdown was either imminent or already under way. Such a complete outage is the first in more than 40 years of the plant’s operation.
Magyar stressed that there is no nuclear danger and that the safety of the facility is fully guaranteed. The government has called on the public and major consumers to voluntarily reduce or shift their electricity use during peak hours. Mandatory restrictions on large industrial consumers are also under consideration. Electricity imports and the restart of the Dunamenti thermal power plant are helping to partially offset the lost generation. The Paks outage is expected to last for weeks due to the ongoing drought.