Blues on the Danube

**Andrew Peach** (0:00)
The River Danube running dry.

**Nick Thorpe** (0:02)
It's crucial to Hungarian drinking water supplies and energy.

**Botan Salma** (0:07)
I lost 300 tonnes freight, and I lost 300 tonnes cargo value.

**Andrew Peach** (0:12)
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
This is Andrew Peach on the way, the economic impact of Europe's heatwave on river freight, car plants and energy production. Also today, one of the biggest names in gaming is about to be sold to Saudi Arabia. And why Japan and the US have been intervening to prop up the yen.
The lack of rainfall this summer in central Europe is causing the Danube to fall to its lowest level since records began. The lack of water is having pretty serious economic impacts. Nuclear power stations in Hungary and Romania have had to shut down. It's affecting commercial river traffic between the Black Sea in the east and Rotterdam in the west. To find out more, I've been talking to our Central Europe correspondent, Nick Thorpe, who's in Budapest.

**Nick Thorpe** (1:04)
It's crucial to Hungarian drinking water supplies and energy, although indirectly 46% of the whole country gets its drinking water from the Danube River. 96% of Budapest population gets its drinking water and most of the other water it uses from the Danube. There have been obviously restrictions on water use because of these dramatically record low levels of the Danube. We're facing above all an energy crisis.

**Andrew Peach** (1:32)
And this is because the Danube is essential to nuclear facilities, both in Hungary and Romania. The nuclear power plants can't operate without the Danube.

**Nick Thorpe** (1:42)
120 kilometres south of Budapest is the Park's nuclear power station. It's a Soviet-built power station for 500 megawatt reactors. Three of those are now completely switched off. That's been happening in a staged way since the end of last week. That's because they can't get the cooling water they need and they were designed to get from the River Danube. They don't have cooling towers. They tried to build the nuclear power station on the shore of the Danube, thinking there'd always be enough water in it. But as a result of these incredibly low water levels, pumps are struggling to get enough water out of it to cool the turbines as they're producing heat. And that heat through a condenser system needs to be cooled down before the water generated in that, or going through the nuclear fuel cycle can be pumped back into the River Danube further downstream. So there's a combination of environmental concerns there. Once the temperature of the water is over 30 degrees centigrade, they're not allowed to pump cooled water back into the Danube, because it would be many degrees higher. I've got a map open in front of me now on the screen showing me how much energy Parkers is still generating. Now we're down to one reactor, and at this particular moment, it's something like 227 megawatts. This is a power station that normally produces more than 2000 megawatts.

**Andrew Peach** (3:03)
So in part that means the countries affected got to import their energy at great cost. Does it actually mean that that energy is running out in short supply with restrictions and things?

**Nick Thorpe** (3:13)
Not for now. The government has drawn up an emergency plan saying that restrictions on energy use will be put into force if companies and individuals and local councils and so on don't impose their own voluntary restrictions. So far, there's been actually an astonishing response from the public and from big energy users, car manufacturers, battery manufacturers and so on. They said that just on Saturday alone, the 700 megawatts of energy were saved by the Hungarian public by companies operating in Hungary. So the government is saying that thanks to that response, there's no areas are being blacked out as such, though they have got a plan that could be put into place, you know, from one moment to the next with compulsory restrictions, literally rotated blackouts around different parts of the country. And they say if necessary, they'll do that in the coming days. In terms of energy imports, I'm just looking again on that map. I can see that at the moment it's producing 46% of its own energy and 54% is being imported, especially from Slovakia, but even, would you believe it, from Ukraine.

**Andrew Peach** (4:18)
And I was going to ask you a bit more about manufacturing, because I know car makers, for example, have halted production, which might be helping with the water shortage, but isn't going to be helping the economy. It's going to be having all kinds of impacts on GDP, on people's employment, you know, and consequences are endless.