Europe’s Heat Wave Just Crashed Its Nuclear Plants — and Electricity Prices Doubled Overnight

A fresh wave of temperatures above 40°C is expected to roll across the continent. Rivers are critically shallow. Cooling water is vanishing. And nuclear power stations that rely on that water are struggling to stay online.

In Hungary, the Paks nuclear plant is facing conditions never seen in its 44 years of operation. In Romania, the Cernavoda station has already taken one reactor offline. Engineers tried everything to keep the second unit running — blasting rock to increase water flow, dropping barges loaded with stones to redirect the current. None of it delivered the necessary result.

With generation falling and water levels still dropping, wholesale electricity prices across European markets have doubled. Analysts warn the spike may not be finished. Countries neighboring France sit in the highest risk zone. There, nuclear output has already plunged more than 20 percent — thanks not only to the heat, but to an invasion of jellyfish clogging the cooling systems.

Europe built an energy model that depends on reliable baseload power and then watched the rivers that keep those plants alive dry up under its own extreme weather. The result is exactly what anyone outside the Brussels bubble could have predicted: higher prices, forced improvisation, and a grid under real pressure.