Bled Dry Before the Drought
Fifteen years of Viktor Orbán's government draining dividends from Hungary's only nuclear plant left it with no reserves when the Danube finally ran low
Hungary spent this week rationing electricity like a country at war. Record heat and drought pushed the Danube to historic lows, AP reported on August 6, and the river's retreat hit the one facility that produces nearly half the country's power: the Paks nuclear plant, which draws river water to cool its reactors.
With output cut to roughly a tenth of normal, the government asked households and industry to cut consumption during peak evening hours, banned freight trains from 5 to 10 p.m., switched off decorative lighting on Budapest's landmarks, and even cancelled this week's parliamentary session to save power. Companies from MOL and Gedeon Richter to Suzuki, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW announced their own cuts.
Days earlier, on August 2, Prime Minister Péter Magyar had warned that Danube levels were the lowest in 44 years and that Paks might shut down entirely for the first time in its history. One reactor block was powered down that night; the plant's own operator stopped short of confirming a full shutdown, saying only that a second unit would run at half capacity and that complete closure remained possible if the river kept falling.
Told this way, the story is a weather event. Told completely, it is the story of a government that spent fifteen years extracting nearly every forint of profit from the plant that now has no cash left to defend itself against exactly this kind of stress.
Fifteen Years, One Purpose
An investigation published by 444.hu on August 6 found that between 2010 and 2025, Orbán's government siphoned almost the entirety of Paks' profit out through the state energy company MVM, officially for unspecified "designated needs." Over that period the plant earned roughly 197 billion forints in net profit, and virtually none of it stayed inside the company.
Once Orbán's populist utility-price-cut policy squeezed the plant's own revenue further, the numbers collapsed outright: profit fell to just 120 million forints in 2023 and only slightly recovered to a bit over 3 billion in 2024, a rounding error for a facility that anchors the national grid.
Energiaklub analyst András Perger summed up the result bluntly: the plant was left with no money and, in his words, its pants down.
No private company would operate a nuclear reactor on margins that thin, and a state that treats its only nuclear plant as a dividend machine first and a piece of critical infrastructure second was never going to leave it the reserves it needed.
The pump station that was never built
That missing cash was not an abstraction. Among the investments the plant could not afford was a new cooling pump station, precisely the upgrade that would matter most in a summer when Danube water levels, not reactor safety systems or fuel supply, are the binding constraint on how much electricity Hungary's largest single power source can produce.
A well-capitalized operator facing a multi-year drought trend across Central Europe might have treated better cooling infrastructure as a basic hedge. Paks never had the money to consider it, because that money had already been paid out as dividends to a government using the plant to fund unrelated political priorities.
A pump station that was never built is now the difference between managed output cuts and a first-ever full shutdown. That is not bad luck. It is the predictable result of running strategic infrastructure for cash rather than for resilience.
The drought didn't cause this crisis, but exposed it
The heat and low water levels battering the Danube this year are real and regional, already disrupting river shipping and straining power plants well beyond Hungary's borders. But the difference between a stress test and a crisis is the margin an operator has going in, and Hungary's government spent a decade and a half making sure Paks had none.
Cancelling parliament to save electricity and banning freight trains for five hours a day are not the actions of a country absorbing a difficult season. They are the actions of a country that let its only nuclear plant run down to the point where a low river can threaten it directly.
Hungary's energy emergency is being described as a natural disaster. It is better understood as an inherited one: the price of a government that spent fifteen years treating a nuclear power plant as a piggy bank for popularity, and left the country to discover the bill the moment the Danube stopped being generous.