Hungary comes ‘within millimetres’ of shutting down nuclear power plant amid drought crisis – Europe live
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Hungary comes ‘within millimetres’ of shutting down nuclear power plant amid drought crisis – Europe live
EU says it is monitoring energy crunch in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania as extreme heat and low water levels in Danube pose challenges in region
LIVE Updated 6m ago
Tue 4 Aug 2026 12.27 BSTFirst published on Tue 4 Aug 2026 08.47 BST
Key events
- 7m agoItaly pushes for EU-funded overseas migrant processing centres modelled on controversial Albania deal
- 45m agoCzechia, Slovakia report record-breaking nighttime temperatures
- 1h agoEU 'monitoring very closely' energy crunch in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania
- 2h agoMorocco says it warned Spain about 'a problem' with Spain's top court ruling on migration
- 2h agoMagyar praises people's solidarity amid energy crunch, but warns of 'hardest days ahead'
- 3h ago4.3 magnitude earthquake reported in Pisa, Italy
- 3h agoCeuta leader accuses Morocco over ‘atrocity’ of mass border crossing
- 3h agoEU ministers to discuss bloc's response to Ceuta migration crisis today
- 4h agoDanube drought - in pictures
- 4h agoMorning opening: Hungary 'within millimetres' of shutting down its nuclear plant as region fights extreme weather and droughts
- 7m agoItaly pushes for EU-funded overseas migrant processing centres modelled on controversial Albania deal
- 45m agoCzechia, Slovakia report record-breaking nighttime temperatures
- 1h agoEU 'monitoring very closely' energy crunch in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania
- 2h agoMorocco says it warned Spain about 'a problem' with Spain's top court ruling on migration
- 2h agoMagyar praises people's solidarity amid energy crunch, but warns of 'hardest days ahead'
- 3h ago4.3 magnitude earthquake reported in Pisa, Italy
- 3h agoCeuta leader accuses Morocco over ‘atrocity’ of mass border crossing
- 3h agoEU ministers to discuss bloc's response to Ceuta migration crisis today
- 4h agoDanube drought - in pictures
- 4h agoMorning opening: Hungary 'within millimetres' of shutting down its nuclear plant as region fights extreme weather and droughts
- Hungary
- Europe live with Jakub Krupa
- Romania
- Extreme heat
- Climate crisis
- Europe
- Drought
- Spain
The partially dried-up Danube riverbed in front of the Paks power plant in Dunaszentbenedek, Hungary. Photograph: Bernadett Szabó/Reuters
The partially dried-up Danube riverbed in front of the Paks power plant in Dunaszentbenedek, Hungary. Photograph: Bernadett Szabó/Reuters
From 4h ago
Hungary has come “within millimetres” of having to shut down its nuclear power plant overnight, prime minister Péter Magyar said, as low water levels in the Danube continue to pose challenges for countries in south-eastern Europe.
Paks Nuclear Power Plant with the partially dried-up Danube riverbed in Dunaszentbenedek, Hungary. Photograph: Bernadett Szabó/Reuters
“Around 1:30 a.m. we were a few millimetres away from completely shutting down the Paks Power Plant, but then the water level stopped falling and by morning it had risen 1.5 centimetres. The last turbine is currently operating safely,” Magyar said on social media.
The plant already operates at a reduced capacity of just over 10% after the Danube fell to a record low, making it impossible to cool it properly.
Energy minister István Kapitány said on Tuesday that a number of energy saving measures succeeded in lowering energy consumption to keep the grid secure.
A number of businesses have made significant adjustments to their normal ways of working to save energy consumption during the peak hours. For example, a grocery chain Lidl changed its baking shifts, and turned off its drink fridges – despite temperatures expected to get close to 40C. Electric car chargers in their parkings can only be used until 5pm, HVG reported.
Over in Romania, the government celebrated that a two-centimetre rise in water levels after yesterday’s spectacular controlled explosion, intended to divert the flow of the Danube to help cool its Cernavodă nuclear plant.
The plant manager told local media that it should help keep the plant running during the next few days, but more interventions are planned today, with plans to sink old barges to further divert the flow of water.
Temperatures are set to surpass 40C in large parts of Romania today, again.
Elsewhere, I will keep an eye on the much-awaited meeting of EU interior ministers who will discuss last week’s migration crisis in Ceuta amid questions about the EU’s relationship with Morocco and the steps needed to secure the bloc’s external borders.
People wait in line to receive food and beverage from the Red Cross, following mass crossings on foot and by sea from Morocco into Spanish territory, in Ceuta, Spain. Photograph: Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
They are meeting at 10am Brussels time, and we should hear from the EU’s migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, in the early afternoon.
I will bring you all the latest lines here.
It’s Tuesday, 4 August 2026, it’s Jakub Krupa here, and this is Europe Live.
Good morning.
Key events
We will no doubt hear more about this proposal – and the EU’s initial response – from the bloc’s migration commissioner Brunner during his press conference in the next hour.
I will bring you the key lines here when it happens.
Well, turns out you don’t quite need to be a fly on the wall to know what the EU ministers are talking about in the context of last week’s events in Ceuta, as some of them are actually quite keen to make their remarks public.
Italy is understood to have called for EU-funded migrant processing centres and return hubs in third countries, with interior minister Matteo Piantedosi telling ministers that they “must act as a united, cohesive bloc to stop departures at their source and return those who have no right to remain on EU territory,” a copy of his speech released by his office showed.
Italian interior minister Matteo Piantedosi speaking during a TV interview last month. Photograph: Mauro Scrobogna/LaPresse/Shutterstock
“Now the time has come to put into practice new hub models for the external processing of asylum procedures and for returns in safe third countries,” he was quoted by Reuters as saying.
But as we extensively covered in the Guardian, the apparent model for this solution – Italy’s controversial deal with Albania – has faced numerous legal challenges.
Italian MEP suggests government wants to ‘hide truth’ about Albania migrant centreRead more
The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights Michael O’Flaherty wrote for us last month saying that “without iron-clad legal safeguards, offshore migration centres can only repeat the worst mistakes of the recent past.”
Other countries in central and eastern Europe are also reporting disruptions caused by the extreme weather conditions.
The Czech Republic has recorded the highest nighttime temperature since records began, with 27.9 C in Bystřice pod Hostýnem, ČT24 reported.
Similar record was broken across the border, in Slovakia, with 27.5 C overnight in Plavecký Peter, surpassing the previous record from 2013, Pravda reported.
Temperatures are expected to rise up to 39C later today.
A woman pours a cup of cold water on her face as she cools of in the Tisza River near the village of Male Trakany, eastern Slovakia Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Oh, interesting: the EU migration commissioner Brunner’s press conference has just been pushed back by about an hour as the meeting is still ongoing.
It’s now expected not before 2pm local time (1pm UK).
Oh, to be a fly on the wall on that call.
Meanwhile, the European Commission said it was “monitoring very closely” the situation in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania as the region faces an energy crunch caused by the ongoing heatwave and drought.
A drone view shows sand banks on the Old Danube river ramification, in Rasova, Constanta, Romania. Photograph: George Calin/Reuters
Energy spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said “the low Danube levels will clearly have an impact on nuclear generation along the route,” and this “concerns several member states.”
The commission was ready to “convene an electricity coordination group as soon as there is a need for that.”
“Generally speaking, climate risks, extreme weather events, have already been embedded in many of our policies related to energy transport already for some time, so we will obviously include, include these aspects in any of our future work as well,” she said.
We are expecting to hear from the EU’s migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, in the next hour as he will brief journalists on today’s meeting of the bloc’s interior ministers on Ceuta.
I will bring it live for you here when he shows up.
Back to discussions on Ceuta, now under way in Brussels (10:08), a senior Moroccan official claimed that Morocco had warned Spain that a recent Spanish court ruling that migrants arriving by sea would not face immediate removal was going to create “a problem,” AFP reported.
Spain’s Supreme Court ruled on 8 July that migrants arriving by sea should not be returned as quickly as others and Madrid has blamed criminal gangs for spreading misinformation about the ruling.
“We started engaging with the Spanish side around 22-23 July, when the networks began talking about this,” the Moroccan senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Monday night.
“We discussed this ruling and its impact. We explained that this ruling was going to create a problem. And it did create a problem,” he said.
A group of migrants approach the border post to make their way back to Morocco, escorted by Spanish infantry soldiers, in the Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images
The official also rejected any suggestion that Morocco was to be blamed for the crisis, saying “at a certain point, the Moroccan law enforcement forces could no longer confront the migrants because the numbers were very large,” and because “the pull effect was very strong,” he said.
“Today, it is up to Spain to find answers to the challenges posed by this ruling,” he said.
For what it’s worth, Spain responded to the ruling in recent days, installing new border containment structures that would provide them a legal claim to use an exemption provided in the court’s ruling and allow to send migrants back across the border.
Meanwhile, Hungary’s prime minister Péter Magyar praised the solidarity of Hungarians after the country faced “the most difficult and critical night” amid a heatwave energy crunch.
Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar (L) and acting president Ágnes Forsthoffer hold a joint press conference at the Sandor Palace in Budapest, Hungary. Photograph: Balint Szentgallay/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
In a video on Facebook, Magyar repeated that the Paks power plant was just “millimetres away” from being shut down overnight, but the water levels started rising again as of this morning.
He praised the “solidarity” shown by Hungarians when reducing their energy consumption, and thanked people working to stabilise the country’s energy grid in these challenging circumstances.
“Tonight’s turn of events gives us cause for optimism, but the hardest days are still ahead of us,” he warned, as Hungary faces a few more days of extreme temperatures.
“Scorching heat of over 40C, drought, and further hardships await, but light now can be seen at the end of the tunnel as cooler weather arrives from Friday, and hopefully much-needed rain in the upper areas of the Danube,” he said.
Temperatures in Budapest are expected to get close to 40C later today.
Meanwhile, a 4.3 magnitude earthquake was reported in the Italian city of Pisa, which was also felt in Livorno, Lucca and Massa Carrara in northern Tuscany, Italian media reported.
The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology reported the earthquake had its epicentre 7km west of Pisa.
Tuscan president Eugenio Giani said the authorities were checking across the region to see if there’s any damage. He later added that while “hundreds” of calls to emergency services were made, there are currently no reports of injuries.
Last Thursday, a 4.7 quake was also reported in the Campi Flegrei caldera, west of Naples.
Ashifa Kassam in Madrid, Okba Mohammad in Ceuta and Lisa O’Carrollin London
A growing chorus of voices has accused Morocco of helping to fuel the crisis in Ceuta, with the leader of the Spanish enclave describing last week’s border crossings as an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity that was seen as being “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco”.
Migrants hold signs reading "asylum" in Spanish while waiting in line to receive food and beverage from the Red Cross, following mass crossings of migrants on foot and by sea from Morocco into Spanish territory, in Ceuta, Spain. Photograph: Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
Spanish officials said on Monday that an estimated 69,500 people who had arrived late last week in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in north Africa, had returned to Morocco in recent days. About 2,500 people who had made the crossing were believed to still be in Ceuta.
The extraordinary influx had overwhelmed the city of 84,000 people and set off a political crisis across the EU as some member states laid blame on Spain.
In Ceuta, leaders pointed to the broader picture of what had transpired. “It’s an atrocity,” said Juan Jesús Vivas, the long-serving conservative leader of the territory.
“There are 88 bodies in the morgue, and there are more on the other side of the border.”
He said local people watched the events play out with a mix of sadness, worry and anguish.
“People see this not as a migration crisis; it was fundamentally an attack, a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity,” Vivas told El País newspaper. “People felt that this, if not orchestrated, was at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco.”
He drew a parallel with May 2021, when Rabat loosened border controls, allowing 10,000 people to cross into Ceuta over the course of two days, during a diplomatic standoff over Madrid’s decision to allow a Western Sahara independence leader to be treated for Covid-19 in Spain.
This time around, analysts have suggested that Spain’s recent rapprochement with Rabat’s arch-enemy Algeria could have triggered a response from Morocco.
Ceuta leader accuses Morocco over ‘atrocity’ of mass border crossingRead more
And if you want to catch up on the latest from Ceuta, here it is:
in Brussels
Over in Brussels, after a weekend of backbiting over the response to the mass border crossings in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, EU ministers will seek to present a more unified front – and signal tougher security at Europe’s frontiers.
Migrants wait in line to receive food and beverage from the Red Cross, following mass crossings of migrants on foot and by sea from Morocco into Spanish territory, in Ceuta, Spain. Photograph: Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
EU home affairs ministers are meeting at 10.30 CET via video conference to assess the bloc’s response to the arrival – and quick departure – of tens of thousands of people at the Spanish territory in north Africa. Around 100 people are estimated to have died on both sides of the Spanish-Moroccan border.
Ministers are not expected to take decisions, but EU sources think they will give a broad endorsement to the measures outlined by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen on Monday, intended to ensure stronger border protection “at critical points” of the EU’s external border.
Von der Leyen wants to double down on five areas: strengthening cooperation with non-EU countries to prevent migration; stronger external borders; implementing early warning systems; dismantling smuggling networks; and boosting returns of people with no right to stay.
At a meeting of senior EU diplomats on Monday, several countries stressed the importance of preventing sudden movements of people, calling for greater use of intelligence and monitoring of disinformation and misinformation.
While Madrid’s envoy voiced his government’s frustration with the response from some member states, others rejected suggestions that they had failed to show solidarity over the sudden influx of arrivals.
A number of member states said they were ready to help and reflected on their own experience: Poland and Lithuania referred to the instrumentalisation of people on the move by the Belarusian dictatorship, while Italy and Greece spoke of their dealings with sudden arrivals of large numbers of people. But despite the warm words, many governments remain critical of Spain’s plan to regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants, which has triggered nearly 1.2m applications.
One EU diplomat said:
“There is some concern that the regularisation of 1.2m people can be used to paint a picture that the door is open.”
This issue is set to run. And EU migration policy in general, including controversial plans for return hubs, will be high on the agenda in the autumn, including at the EU’s next scheduled summit in October.
Usually submerged areas of the Danube River are exposed amid exceptionally low water levels, in Rasova, Romania. Photograph: Vadim Ghirdă/AP
A drone view shows Romanian authorities using a dredging ship to alter the flow of water on Danube's Old branch, near Izvoarele, Romania. Photograph: George Calin/Reuters
A man splashes water on a horse to cool it off next to a bank of sand on the Danube River, as usually submerged areas are exposed due to extreme low levels of the water in Roseti, Romania. Photograph: Andreea Alexandru/AP
An aerial drone photo shows the exposed riverbed of the Danube River in Dunaszentbenedek, Hungary. Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite shows the Danube River and its water levels as it passes through the town of Paks, as well as the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, south of Budapest, Hungary. Photograph: COPERNICUS SENTINEL DATA 2026/AFP/Getty Images
Hungary has come “within millimetres” of having to shut down its nuclear power plant overnight, prime minister Péter Magyar said, as low water levels in the Danube continue to pose challenges for countries in south-eastern Europe.
Paks Nuclear Power Plant with the partially dried-up Danube riverbed in Dunaszentbenedek, Hungary. Photograph: Bernadett Szabó/Reuters
“Around 1:30 a.m. we were a few millimetres away from completely shutting down the Paks Power Plant, but then the water level stopped falling and by morning it had risen 1.5 centimetres. The last turbine is currently operating safely,” Magyar said on social media.
The plant already operates at a reduced capacity of just over 10% after the Danube fell to a record low, making it impossible to cool it properly.
Energy minister István Kapitány said on Tuesday that a number of energy saving measures succeeded in lowering energy consumption to keep the grid secure.
A number of businesses have made significant adjustments to their normal ways of working to save energy consumption during the peak hours. For example, a grocery chain Lidl changed its baking shifts, and turned off its drink fridges – despite temperatures expected to get close to 40C. Electric car chargers in their parkings can only be used until 5pm, HVG reported.
Over in Romania, the government celebrated that a two-centimetre rise in water levels after yesterday’s spectacular controlled explosion, intended to divert the flow of the Danube to help cool its Cernavodă nuclear plant.
The plant manager told local media that it should help keep the plant running during the next few days, but more interventions are planned today, with plans to sink old barges to further divert the flow of water.
Temperatures are set to surpass 40C in large parts of Romania today, again.
Elsewhere, I will keep an eye on the much-awaited meeting of EU interior ministers who will discuss last week’s migration crisis in Ceuta amid questions about the EU’s relationship with Morocco and the steps needed to secure the bloc’s external borders.
People wait in line to receive food and beverage from the Red Cross, following mass crossings on foot and by sea from Morocco into Spanish territory, in Ceuta, Spain. Photograph: Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
They are meeting at 10am Brussels time, and we should hear from the EU’s migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, in the early afternoon.
I will bring you all the latest lines here.
It’s Tuesday, 4 August 2026, it’s Jakub Krupa here, and this is Europe Live.
Good morning.
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