Cernavoda stays shut: Danube still too low to restart Romania's two reactors
Victoria Shinder2 min readRomania's only nuclear plant, which normally supplies about a fifth of the country's electricity, is still off the grid three months into a drought. Nuclearelectrica said in an update reported by World Nuclear News on 30 October that both Cernavoda units remain shut down because the Danube has not recovered enough.
The operator disconnected unit 1 on 28 July, citing "the unprecedentedly low level of the Danube, caused by severe drought". Unit 2 followed on 12 August, when the river at the plant fell to 182 centimetres, below the 185-centimetre mark required for normal operation. The station has two 650 MWe Candu reactors, in commercial operation since 1996 and 2007.
The new update reports a rise of about 10 cm in the water measured in the plant's pump intake basin. Nuclearelectrica describes it as a localised rise, not yet matched by a general rise across the Danube basin upstream, and says current forecasts do not indicate that all the criteria to reconnect even one unit will be met. The intake level must stay above the reconnection threshold for several days and show an upward trend. Chief executive Mihai Gioară said the company will ask for grid connection as a priority once that level is reached.
The company stressed that the plant has several cooling systems designed for different water levels, so nuclear safety functions are maintained throughout. The same low river affected Hungary's Paks plant, which returned to full output by the end of August after emergency engineering works, and plants in Bulgaria, which are now running.
What it means
The outage is a cooling-water constraint, not a reactor problem, and its end depends on rainfall upstream rather than on anything the operator controls. For Romania's system it means a large block of baseload has been missing through the autumn, replaced by imports and other plants. Paks shows the alternative: engineering works that let a plant run at lower river levels, which is the option Bulgaria says it is studying.