Romania halted operations of its only nuclear power plant on Thursday, a rare shutdown due to a drought scorching Europe that has caused the Danube river, whose waters cool the plant, to fall to record lows.
Much of Europe is facing another heatwave this summer amid droughts that have driven rivers to historic lows.
The Cernavodă plant, which usually generates a fifth of Romania's electricity, has been shut down just once before, in 2003, due to drought.
The national nuclear energy company Nuclearelectrica had already shut down one of the plant's two reactors last month and announced on Thursday that it needed to shut the second as well "due to the significant and ongoing drop in the water level of the River Danube."
"We do not foresee a restart within the next ten days," the plant's director, Romeo Urjan, told the AFP news agency.
