Shafaqna English– In a move that reflects the severity of the regional power crisis, Romania deployed demolition charges on Monday(3 Aug 2026) to break up a rock outcrop obstructing the flow of the drought-ravaged Danube river, aiming to redirect life-saving cooling water toward the country’s only functioning nuclear reactor – a risky and unprecedented engineering intervention that highlights how increasingly desperate European nations have become in their struggle to keep their atomic plants online amid plummeting water levels and surging energy demands.
Across the border in Hungary, officials have warned that their single nuclear power station – which also depends on the Danube for its cooling water – has been severely impacted by the river’s receding levels, and they now estimate that they may be able to squeeze just two additional days of electricity generation from the facility before it becomes impossible to operate safely.