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Record heatwave cripples Europe’s energy supply as nuclear reactors are taken offline.

Europe’s brutal heatwave is closing schools and factories and claiming lives. Now, its nuclear power plants are shutting down.

Jamie Seidel, News.au 28th June 2026

 Record heatwave cripples Europe’s energy supply as nuclear reactors are
taken offline. Europe’s brutal heatwave is closing schools and factories
and claiming lives. Now, its nuclear power plants are shutting down. France
has already shut down three of its nuclear reactors.

“The main pressure
comes from a triple squeeze: Cooling demand rises sharply, while power
plants and grids become less efficient, and some thermal and nuclear plants
must cut output because cooling water is too warm or scarce,” Simone
Tagliapietra, a researcher for the Bruegel think-tank, told the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Nuclear reactors require water
to keep their radioactive cores cool and contained. But the river water
feeding this process has become hot.

That reduces its cooling effect.

And the wastewater comes out even hotter. Which threatens to breach environmental safety limits.

Other French reactors are operating at reduced power. And more are being wound down as the heatwave lingers.

Blackouts are now a thing. The supply problem, explains MIT climate analyst Casey Crownhart, is being exacerbated by other nuclear reactors being offline.

Peak European electricity demand is traditionally during winter. That’s when everyone turns their electric heaters on. Summer is supposed to experience far less demand. So maintenance cycles and repairs are scheduled for the warmer months. Those months are now unexpectedly hot. Switzerland is experiencing the same problem. It says the output of its Beznau nuclear reactors have been reduced. They will be shut down if the extreme heat continues.

Heat isn’t only a problem for nuclear power plants………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The French government is scrambling to respond to the reactor shutdown crisis. Emergency meetings are being held in stuffy offices. Similar meetings are happening across Europe.

Meanwhile, El Nino’s fallout is beginning to reach across Africa and Australia and into the Indian Ocean. https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/record-heatwave-cripples-europes-energy-supply-as-nuclear-reactors-are-taken-offline/news-story/5962d04f0b8268a57217dc7ab12f213e

July 1, 2026 Posted by | climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

We’re up against forces that have all the money in the world’: Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres

What is certain, though, is that the land cannot withstand these centres’ immense demand for water. According to analysis by the Guardian, two-thirds of planned datacentres in the US are in drought-stricken areas. The larger centres need up to 5m gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the average usage of 50,000 people. It is unclear what the plan is and whose needs will take priority between AI, agriculture and everyone else.

In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global

Guardian, Mon 29 Jun 2026

When Erin Brockovich woke to find 30 emails from people from the same town, she realised something was going on. People email Brockovich all the time because of what happened in 1993, when she was instrumental in suing Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) on behalf of residents of the town of Hinkley, California, whose groundwater had been contaminated. The case resulted in a settlement of $333m – then the largest ever payout for a direct-action lawsuit. When she was immortalised by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, she became the hero we didn’t know we needed, a modern day Joan of Arc. She had won against PG&E with no formal legal training.

The emails she received a few weeks ago were about datacentres. In April, she put a callout on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied. Tech companies have needed datacentres to power their technology “for ever”, she says, but the new ones being built to power AI? “This feels like Hinkley on steroids.”

This isn’t a story about AI, she says. “That genie is out of the bottle: it’s here, it’s an effective tool, you can use it or not,” Brockovich says matter-of-factly. This is about the massive structures being built to house the vast computing facilities AI requires. These datacentres, she says, stretch over “hundreds and hundreds of acres”. In May, Utah gave approval to a centre twice the size of Manhattan.

Some of the emails Brockovich gets from people near datacentres express genuine bafflement: “Why did I not know about this? How did this construction just start? Why am I now getting a notice from the city council that this has already passed when I didn’t even have a voice in it?” Others reflect concerns about the impact of the centres: “What about our resources? What’s happening to the water? Who’s paying for all this energy and am I going to foot that bill? What will the future impact on health be from these monstrosities? What’s going to happen to the wildlife?”

From the emails, Brockovich built a map of significant AI datacentres in the US that are either operational or under construction, overlaid with locations where community members have emailed in concerns. This open-source document is chilling: as of 24 June, 33 AI datacenters have been completed and are operational, 68 are under construction and 41 are proposed. And there had been 7,005 reports submitted through the online form, which is to say, all that is known about them is what people have seen. As a post on her Substack blog is headlined: “If data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?”

“It’s happening in every US state, multiple counties, rural areas, ranches, farms and neighbourhoods. People watch nature because they respect it, they need it. And they’re watching it being destroyed,” says Brockovich. She has heard from people saying: “I’m concerned this is where the bald eagles nest,” “I’m watching wildlife disappear,” “I’m seeing dead animals.” Some communities learn about a centre months after it has been approved; others don’t hear anything about them and watch as a vast building emerges.

What is certain, though, is that the land cannot withstand these centres’ immense demand for water. According to analysis by the Guardian, two-thirds of planned datacentres in the US are in drought-stricken areas. The larger centres need up to 5m gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the average usage of 50,000 people. It is unclear what the plan is and whose needs will take priority between AI, agriculture and everyone else.

“People are reporting bill spikes,” Brockovich says, reading an email from someone who says their monthly water bill went from $22 (£17) to more than $350 (£265). The threat of these centres is about more than money – it feels existential. “How will the water use disrupt the balance of nature? People are asking: “What will happen to us?”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..After Hinkley, she worked on other environmental pollution cases against PG&E related to hexavalent chromium, the chemical that contaminated Hinkley’s water. More recently, she has focused on Pfas (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), “forever chemicals” that are a component in firefighting foam used heavily on US military bases. Pfas have been linked to health problems, including fertility issues and some cancers. In 2017, communities living near military bases reported worrying levels of these chemicals in their drinking water.

Brockovich’s renown is plainly the reason people email her when they have concerns. This is what led her to north-west Georgia last year, where staggeringly high levels of Pfas were found in the water and the wider environment. It was believed that they came from carpet factories that used stain-resistant chemicals. The major carpet factories say they complied with all regulations and no longer use Pfas. She is still supporting people there with their campaigns.

Unlike toxic chemicals leaking into water, nothing about datacentres is discreet. Signs that might be subtle one day – an absence of birdsong – the next day will be a centre up and running at full volume. “It really becomes about the noise, the decibels,” Brockovich says. People will write to her and say: “We’re going insane 24/7,” “It’s got to stop,” “It’s humming, it’s hissing, it’s buzzing.” She says: “It’s generators. It’s increased electric bills. It’s power surges.”

These structures are appearing without the consultation you would need to erect a new sports hall, as if people won’t notice. But people certainly will notice, because the buildings are vast. It feels like a step into post-democracy, which is a tech bro fantasy, a world in which laws and regulations have been obviated. The big tech companies seem to have blueprinted their fantasy and started building it.

Alternatives are now being mooted. “People are talking about putting them at the bottom of the ocean,” says Brockovich. “They’re talking about having barges and putting the datacentres there, using waves as the energy in cooler climates. Elon Musk wants to put them in space.” But with innumerable Earth-based datacentres already built or in the works, this feels like puff – the future you could have had, had you not sleepwalked into the one that has arrived.

For Brockovich, this is all a distraction. The first thing she wants is a case-by-case moratorium on approving datacentres. ( (She is collating these cases through her open-source mapping site and says councils vary in the action they are prepared to take, according to how surprised by, or receptive to, local complaints their officials are. Many states are only now stopping to consider whether there should be state-level regulation and oversight of datacentres – and, if so, what implications that would have for local decision-making and autonomy.

This takes time. Seventy-nine municipalities in the US have so far have issued moratoriums, many immediately being hit with lawsuits for breaking their original deal. Pauses have been introduced in Georgia, Maryland, Michigan and South Carolina – one introduced in Maine was then vetoed – but these are early interventions against tech behemoths.

When I ask Brockovich about the political climate – a president committed to AI and blatantly dismissive of environmental concerns – she is careful to stress that opposition to datacentres is bipartisan. She knows from her work fighting Pfas, though, that a change in administration can make an enormous difference to the success of these campaigns. In the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency, a clean-up operation was announced by the Pentagon. However, this plan has quietly been delayed by Donald Trump’s Department of Defense: in some areas, it won’t start until 2039.

Yet the nature of Brockovich’s campaigning is not to go straight to the top and demand policy change, but rather to build lawsuits from the ground up. Victory, to her, is won by way of a pragmatic to-do list. To start, she would go to local government and say: “I’d like to see an environmental-impact report. I’d like to see how you propose to power all this. Are you going to build your own power? Are you relying on our already strained resources?” She says: “Let’s get that information first and then have a town hall meeting where the people can be a voice in it.” She has a degree of confidence that the law still has teeth. “Lawsuits aren’t settling for $333m any more; they’re settling for billions,” she says.

Brockovich’s datacentre work goes beyond the US; she has been contacted by people in Australia, India, Scotland and Ireland. There is already a moratorium on any more datacentres in Dublin; even by 2023, such centres were accounting for a fifth of Ireland’s electricity usage. “This is a planetary thing,” she says. “It’s overwhelming. We have to have some courage to show up, and it’s difficult to do that when you’re up against forces that have all the money and all the intelligence and all the bandwidth in the world.” She, meanwhile, is “getting too old for this, by the way. I’m in my legacy phase. I have six grandchildren.”

She is smiling. All that may be true, but even if this is her final campaign, she won’t walk away until it’s over. She can beat this – she just can’t beat it on her own. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/29/were-up-against-forces-that-have-all-the-money-in-the-world-erin-brockovich-on-her-battle-against-ai-datacentres

July 1, 2026 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

Swiss nuclear power station shut down as river warms

The two Beznau nuclear reactors in Switzerland which are cooled by water from the river Aare, have been taken off grid due to the water overheating.

Swiss Info 26th June 2026, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/energy-transition/the-river-cooled-beznau-nuclear-power-station-is-being-shut-down-the-aare-is-too-warm/91657359

The energy company Axpo announced the decision on Friday.

Axpo stated that the two reactors are currently in a shut-down state. The temperature of the river Aare reached 25 degrees Celcius, which does not allow sufficient cooling.

The output of the two reactors had already been reduced on Tuesday – most recently to 50%. According to Axpo, the temperature of the River Aare reached 25 degrees for the first time on Wednesday after the cooling water had been fully mixed.

Axpo indicated that if there was no prospect of the Aare cooling down, the reactors would be shut down completely on Friday. The two reactor units on the Aare island in Döttingen had already temporarily suspended electricity production in July 2025.

July 1, 2026 Posted by | climate change, Switzerland | Leave a comment

Obliterating Gaza’s Children: The Damning UN Report

 SCHEERPOST, June 27, 2026, Dan Steinbock Informed Comment

From Gaza and beyond, Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children. It is in line with the new Obliteration Doctrine and the topic of a new UN report.

When I was working on The Fall of Israel (2024) and particularly The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), what I found most repulsive was the targeting of children in the Gaza Strip.

By late 2024, the testimonies of health professionals on location indicated that the deaths of many children in Gaza were not just collateral damage, but outcomes of deliberate, targeted actions.

The testimony of Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a young American trauma and general surgeon who had volunteered in Palestine including the European Hospital in Khan Younis, was particularly compelling.

“I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones,” Sidhwa said. “But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die.”

The statement of Dr. Sidhwa, who subsequently became one of the endorsers of my book, The Obliteration Doctrine, was supported by dozens of other remarkable and courageous medical volunteers in Gaza. And these testimonies, in turn, have been supported by many reports of multiple international NGOs and multilateral organizations.

So, the latest report of the UN Independent International Commission is hardly new. Nonetheless, it is among the most consequential documents to emerge from the Gaza war. Its conclusion is stark: Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, actions that the Commission argues constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

The Commission’s findings

The Commission’s report concludes that the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children is not incidental collateral damage but part of a recurring pattern of conduct. In line with the Genocide Convention, it argues that such actions are a key indicator of genocidal intent because they strike at the future existence of the Palestinian people.

According to the inquiry, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed between October 2023 and October 2025, representing roughly 30 percent of all fatalities, while over 44,000 were injured. Even since the October 2025 ceasefire, at least 265 children have been killed by Israeli military fire, and 400 more injured, many of them with “catastrophic” wounds.

Children and the logic of genocide

In The Obliteration Doctrine, I showed that modern warfare in Gaza evolved beyond traditional military objectives toward the destruction of the social foundations of Palestinian existence. The Commission’s findings reinforce this interpretation.

Historically, genocide scholars have emphasized that attacks on children occupy a unique place in genocidal campaigns. The 1948 Genocide Convention identifies not only direct killing but also the infliction of conditions calculated to destroy a protected group. In Gaza, famine served the same genocidal function as starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.

Children embody demographic continuity, cultural reproduction, and collective future. Consequently, systematic violence against children has appeared repeatedly in cases later recognized as genocide, from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda.

The Commission explicitly states that targeting children attacks “the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and determine their future.” Its findings connect killings to broader patterns: destruction of schools, hospitals, pediatric facilities, neonatal care units, food systems, and water infrastructure.

That’s the ultimate objective: the genocide and ecocide of Palestine, its culture and children. Israel’s devastation of Lebanon follows in the footprints.

From an empirical perspective, the cumulative effect is measurable. Public-health research consistently demonstrates that childhood exposure to mass violence produces lifelong deficits in physical health, educational attainment, psychological resilience, and economic productivity.

Israel did not triumph in Gaza. Moral darkness did.

Human cost beyond death statistics……………………………………………………………………

Hind Rajab, the voice that refuses to disappear…………………………………………………………………………….

High technology and moral decay……………………………………………………………….

The cost to Israeli society and soldiers………………………………………………………

If Gaza becomes the new norm

The broader international implications may be even more alarming. If the deliberate targeting of children becomes normalized, the consequences extend far, far beyond the Middle East.

International humanitarian law depends fundamentally on protecting civilians, especially children. If powerful states can openly disregard these norms without meaningful accountability, the deterrent effect of international law weakens everywhere.

Empirical evidence suggests that impunity encourages repetition. The failures to prevent atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur contributed to future violations by signaling weak enforcement. Conversely, successful accountability mechanisms have historically reduced recurrence.


The risks include greater regional radicalization, transnational terrorism, refugee flows, intensified great-power rivalry, erosion of international institutions, and the spread of increasingly unrestricted warfare.

In The Obliteration Doctrine, I warned repeatedly that what happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. The Strip became a laboratory for new forms of warfare later exported elsewhere.

The Commission’s findings raise precisely that concern. If the systematic destruction of children, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure becomes accepted in one conflict, future belligerents may invoke the precedent.

The ultimate question raised by the report is therefore not only what happened to Gaza’s children. It is whether the international community is willing to preserve the principle that children remain beyond the reach of war itself.

For if that principle fails in Gaza, it will not survive elsewhere.

Dan Steinbock is the author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, . He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/27/obliterating-gazas-children-the-damning-un-report/

July 1, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Will the heatwave spark action, or further inflame the culture wars?

Patrick Greenfield, Guardian, 29 June 26

Last week’s extreme weather should galvanise the political response to global heating. But the sad paradox is that it could bolster support for climate-sceptical parties

You could be forgiven for thinking that last week’s heatwave in Europe would be a galvanising moment for action on the climate crisis. At one point, more than 150 million Europeans sweltered in temperatures above 35C (95F) – with several parts of the continent soaring past 40C. A heatwave of this magnitude has never been recorded this early in the year.

When scientists finish their calculations, the death toll will probably number in the thousands. Spain, one of the few countries that produces real-time statistics on excess deaths linked to heat, has recorded more than 100 per day since Wednesday. French authorities said that at least 1,000 additional deaths had been recorded between 24 and 27 June, a figure that is likely to rise. They include four toddlers who died in incidents linked to the heat. A three-year-old boy in a Paris suburb was found dead last week after climbing into a car and becoming trapped.

There is a miserable inevitability surrounding these events: scientists have long warned they were coming. Yet countries have not done enough to cut the emissions from fossil fuels that are causing the extreme weather – or adapt to the realities of managing the toll on their transport and healthcare systems.

For today’s First Edition, I spoke with Ajit Niranjan, the Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent, about whether this week’s heatwave in Europe could prompt a fresh drive for action on global heating or whether it may, counterintuitively, boost support for political parties that are sceptical about the climate crisis. But first, the headlines.

…………..Europe heatwave | Germany, Czechia, Poland and Hungary reached record temperatures of more than 40C on Sunday as a heatwave linked to hundreds of deaths in western Europe spread east.

…………..The arrival of extreme weather in Europe has been quick. It is the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the planet. In the 1950s, 60s and 80s, there was not a single “tropical night” recorded at the London Heathrow weather station – defined as when the night-time temperature does not fall below 20C. Now, they are common: four in a row were recorded last week, according to the popular weather blogger London & Southeast.

The UK and other European countries are unprepared for these conditions and the immense strain they put on health and travel networks. In the UK, hundreds of schools closed early, workplaces overheated, and train operators asked people not to travel. On Wednesday, the London ambulance service recorded its busiest ever day for the most serious category of callouts, with 642 responses to reports of cardiac arrests, patients who have stopped breathing and life-threatening injuries. Just two days later, the record was broken again, with more 999 calls made than ever before, more even than during the Covid-19 pandemic.

By yesterday, the heatwave had moved east. Poland, Czechia and Slovakia were all expecting record temperatures of more than 40C. Bautzen in in eastern Saxony broke the German re

A boost for the far right

Sometimes, climate-driven weather events can temporarily cut through, says Ajit, pointing to the 2021 floods in the Ahr valley in Germany, which killed 188 people and washed away entire villages. But increasingly, the opposite happens.

“One trend that’s possibly the most counterintuitive about these kinds of moments is that far-right parties who are denying the science of climate change can get a bit of a boost from extreme weather events,” says Ajit. “They spin the extreme weather as a failure of government policy, arguing that focusing on climate change was part of the initial problem, and it is more about mismanagement.”

In many cases, such as the 2024 floods in Valencia, when more than 230 people were killed after a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours to parts of eastern Spain, both things are true: the climate drove the extreme weather, but poor governance contributed to the deadly outcome. This is likely to become an increasingly common dynamic as extreme weather events grow in frequency.

“Both sides of this issue need to be addressed,” says Ajit. “There is this weird tendency where political parties completely deny one of the causes by either focusing just on climate or just on adaptation, without having a good plan for the other. This is certainly a part of the strategy used by far-right parties to bash climate policy,.”

………………https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/29/first-edition-monday-briefing-heatwave-europe-uk-political-action-far-right-culture-wars

July 1, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Friends of the Earth Adelaide has made a submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry.

Philip White, June 29 2026

FoE Adelaide’s submission added perspectives related to national security, safety, employment and radioactive waste. Click here to read the full submission.

Based on decades of experience regarding nuclear waste management issues and debates in Australia, our submission focused on those problems insofar as they relate to AUKUS.

By rights, the parliament should conduct a genuine public review of the AUKUS program, given that it commits Australian taxpayers to spending hundreds of billions of dollars for decades to come with dubious benefit to our security in return. 

In the absence of an official inquiry, we are hopeful that this independent inquiry will shine a light on the many issues that should have been considered before the government committed Australia to AUKUS.

The first hearing, held in Melbourne on 11 June, received many high-quality presentations. Most of the points that we would make were covered in that hearing. In particular, we endorse the comments made by the expert witnesses: Gareth Evans,

Tilman Ruff, Richard Tanter, John Lander, Joseph Camilleri, Rod Campbell and Dave Sweeney. Their critiques of the flaws in AUKUS align with ours, including in regard to the following:

• sacrifice of Australian sovereignty,

• negative impact on national security,

• opportunity cost,

• questionable industrial and employment benefits,

• safety risks and environmental cost,

• challenge of managing and disposing of radioactive waste, including foreign-sourced waste,

• negative impact on First Nations people,

• nuclear proliferation and safeguards implications of military reactors powered by highly enriched uranium fuel,

• implications for our obligations under the Treaty of Rarotonga of ‘rotation’ through Australian bases of nuclear weapon-capable vessels and aircraft, and

• the uncertainty that nuclear-powered submarines will even be delivered.

FoE Adelaide’s submission added perspectives related to national security, safety, employment and radioactive waste. Click here to read the full submission.

July 1, 2026 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, politics | Leave a comment

The World Is Racing to Develop New Nuclear Fuels

Oil Price, By Felicity Bradstock – Jun 28, 2026,

  • Advanced reactors and SMRs increasingly require fuels such as HALEU, but commercial supplies remain limited outside Russia and China.
  • The U.S. and U.K. are investing heavily in domestic uranium enrichment to strengthen nuclear fuel security.
  • Several reactor developers are adopting LEU+ as a more readily available alternative while domestic HALEU production expands.

…………………………………………………………….. Accessing HALEU and TRISO at scale remains a challenge, as the China National Nuclear Corporation is the only commercial-scale producer of TRISO fuels, and Russia’s TENEX is the only commercial-scale supplier of HALEU. This has driven several companies in the United States and across Europe to explore alternative fuels to power SMRs, to shift reliance away from Russia and China.

While several companies continue to rely on Russia for their uranium supplies, some countries are looking to develop a domestic HALEU production capacity, while many companies are exploring the potential of using alternative, more easily accessible uranium fuels to power operations. https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/The-World-Is-Racing-to-Develop-New-Nuclear-Fuels.html

July 1, 2026 Posted by | ENERGY | Leave a comment