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Data centres and heatwaves: a climate blight in the public eye

A growing pushback on the controversial developments may hold the key to changing climate attitudes


Jeevan Vasagar, The Observer, Thursday 10 September 2026

An immediate threat to lives and livelihoods can be a catalyst for change. A YouGov poll in late June found a majority of British people linked the exceptionally hot weather this summer to climate change. So far, so unsurprising.

But the same polling also showed that attitudes to climate change have hardly budged, despite the heatwaves. The share of the population that is worried about climate change, around two-thirds, has remained constant since September 2021.

What does it take to induce a dramatic shift in attitudes? The answer to that question appears to be: data centres.

This is most obvious in the US, where a statewide moratorium was announced in New York, followed by a pause in Texas, pending an audit that will cover power use, water use, and impacts on local communities. But there’s a growing pushback in Britain too, from Fife to Brick Lane.

The opposition combines concerns about emissions, lack of local benefit and sheer size. A proposed data centre at Auchtertool, a village near Kirkcaldy in Scotland, would cover an area the size of 100 football pitches. The hyperscale data centres currently going through the planning system would require “colossal” amounts of electricity, according to the campaign group Foxglove. Water UK, the water industry’s trade body, says data centres currently use around 6.6m litres of water a day, but by the end of this decade the government’s ambition to triple data centre capacity means this figure could rise to around 20m litres a day. That’s quite a thirst…………………………………………………………….
https://observer.co.uk/news/climate/article/data-centres-and-heatwaves-a-climate-blight-in-the-public-eye

September 13, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Heatwaves and wildfires show why we must stop nuclear power – Sam Mason.

nuclear power is on the frontline of climate change as it threatens its infrastructure. Sizewell B and the construction site of Sizewell C in Suffolk, for example, are located on one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe and will be subject to storm surges and floods.

“This summer should serve as another wake-up call to the climate crisis. It’s here and nuclear power is neither going to help to mitigate it or protect us from its impacts.”

, By Sam Mason, https://labouroutlook.org/2026/09/09/heatwaves-and-wildfires-show-why-we-must-stop-nuclear-power-sam-mason/


The European Copernicus climate change service has confirmed that June and July were the hottest period on record across western Europe. Extreme heat, record excess summer deaths, drought and an intensification of wildfires, the new ‘normal’ of the climate crisis arrived in full force this summer.

In debates on energy security, nuclear power is often cited as essential to both energy security and decarbonisation. However, as we are increasingly seeing, nuclear is itself vulnerable to climate change.

But it didn’t take a summer of relentless heatwaves to tell us this. Dr Paul Dorfman at the University of Sussex has consistently been highlighting that nuclear power is on the frontline of climate change as it threatens its infrastructure. Sizewell B and the construction site of Sizewell C in Suffolk, for example, are located on one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe and will be subject to storm surges and floods.

And as we now know, it is also at risk from wildfires.

The blaze on Dunwich Heath in Suffolk was within a couple of miles of the nuclear power station. Thankfully, the winds steered it away, but the reality is that hotter and drier summers are making wildfires, based on research following the 2022 record temperatures, six times more likely.

Another argument for nuclear power is that it’s essential as a baseload energy source to fill in for renewable energy when the sun doesn’t shine, or the wind doesn’t blow. Arguments that are failing to stack up, and indeed, proving the opposite in the face of a rapidly warming world.

France, a country where nuclear power provides around 70% of its energy, is reported to have seen a dip of around 20% in power production in early August as a result of the continued heatwaves. Such disruptions aren’t new, but are increasingly apparent as summers have become hotter, and this year was on such a scale to have been described as unprecedented.

A multiple of factors has been the cause: jellyfish infestations in the water intakes of coastal plants – themselves a result of warming seas, low river levels, and river water temperatures exceeding regulatory thresholds. The latter means the heat of the water being expelled back into rivers is a threat to local ecology and biodiversity.

According to analysis by Carbon Brief, around 60 of the world’s 440 reactors use ‘once-through river cooling’ and are the most the most impacted by heatwaves and droughts.

In Hungary and Romania, nuclear power plants reliant on the Danube for cooling had to be shut down or saw their output reduced due to drought and low river levels. The severity of the situation in the Danube was such that the Romanian navy was brought in to undertake ‘controlled blasts’ to divert the river flow to one of the two reactors, which was shut down.

Such constraints impact across the energy system, both within countries reliant on nuclear power and those who import this energy. And happening at a time when the extreme heat is placing greater pressure on demand as use of air conditioning and refrigeration increases.

With the global dash to establish AI and data centres as a new growth ‘cash cow’, governments are looking to increase their nuclear capacity, whether with conventional reactors or Small Modular Reactors. The Republic of Ireland, which has banned nuclear power since 1999, has reopened this debate as a response to its burgeoning data centre energy needs.

As if there were not reasons enough to question the use of nuclear power, in a warming world and with climate change impacts intensifying, it is beyond time to stop and reinvest all efforts into a renewable energy transition. This summer should serve as another wake-up call to the climate crisis. It’s here, and nuclear power is neither going to help to mitigate it nor protect us from its impacts.

September 12, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Climate change is exposing nuclear power’s reliability problem

For nuclear power plants to be reliable, they need operating conditions to be stable. With climate change intensifying by the year, one cannot expect predictability, control, and stability.

By Valerie Arnhold, M.V. Ramana | Opinion | September 6, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/09/climate-change-is-exposing-nuclear-powers-reliability-problem/

One of nuclear energy’s biggest selling points is its claims of reliability. “Nuclear energy is the only large-scale power source that can be tapped in even the most extreme weather conditions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” boasts the American energy company Constellation. “Nuclear power plants are very reliable, and can run for many months without interruption, providing large amounts of clean electricity, regardless of the time of day, the weather, or the season,” says the World Nuclear Association. At a public meeting in June, Keith Ammon, a pro-nuclear Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, echoed these claims: “Nuclear doesn’t care about the weather,” he said. “It just runs.”

Over the next few months, several countries in Europe had to shut down nuclear plants because of hot weather and drought—proving that nuclear power does, indeed, care about the weather. Coming at a time when demand for electricity was high, these countries were faced with an imminent failure of the electricity grid. Citizens and businesses in Hungary and Romania had to reduce their consumption. Ironically, it was solar power—often critiqued by nuclear boosters as unreliable—that provided additional electricity and staved off shortages in some countries. A further irony is that these heat waves are more likely and more severe because of climate change, which is often advanced as the reason to expand nuclear power in the first place.

European countries heavily dependent on nuclear energy were particularly affected. The near-complete shutdown of Hungary’s Paks at the beginning of August, when output was reduced from around 1960 megawatts to around 225, and complete shutdown of Romania’s Cernavoda power plant on August 13, led to a loss of 40 percent and 20 percent of the respective countries’ electricity generation capacity. Both countries declared a state of energy emergency and asked companies and citizens to reduce energy consumption for 30 days. In France, the electricity regulator RTE recorded on August 12 that more than a third of its nuclear generation capacity was down, as eight reactors were completely shut down, with five operating at reduced levels.

Some have made the case that the amount of time when nuclear reactors are not generating power is quite small and their integrated output over the whole year is not significantly impacted. But this is of little comfort to countries like France or Hungary when they end up losing a large fraction of their electricity generation all at once, especially during a heat wave when the need for electricity is high, and their population’s access to electricity is in peril.

Underlying most of these shutdowns is water, or lack thereof. Nuclear reactors need even more water than other thermal power plants for regular operations and to ensure vital safety functions. As the Nuclear Energy Agency explained, nuclear “power plants have in general greater cooling needs than other thermoelectric generating technologies. This results from the lower efficiency of the power conversion cycle, as well as from the latent safety function cooling water plays, for instance to evacuate residual heat during planned or unplanned shutdowns.”

In reactors, roughly a third of the heat produced by the nuclear fission reactions is converted into electricity. The remaining heat must be expelled into the environment; if not, the hot fuel rods will melt down. The severe accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan after an earthquake and tsunami knocked out nearly all of the plant’s backup energy sources shows the safety consequences of completely losing the ability to remove heat.

The most efficient way to remove the extra heat is to continuously pump water from some large outside source like a river or a lake. After passing through the reactor, the water is released back into the same source, but at a higher temperature.

The conditions of the water used for cooling could affect nuclear power plants in two ways. Most of the time, the primary concern is that the hot water being discharged from nuclear power plants could harm flora and fauna. Regulatory agencies, therefore, set rules about the temperature of the water on the basis of potential harm to aquatic ecosystems. The Swiss Federal Office of Energy, for example, required the Beznau nuclear plant to be shut down in late June after water temperatures in the Aare river reached 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), in order to ensure the safety of fish populations. In some cases, regulators have modified the rules temporarily to allow reactors to continue operating, as they did in France this July.

Drought is an even bigger problem. If water levels in rivers drop too low, it becomes challenging or impossible to draw in water for cooling. This is what happened in Hungary and Romania after the river Danube fell to historically low levels this summer—just 4 inches, well below the previous all-time low of 13 inches in 2018. In what can only be described as pure desperation, Hungary sank two barges and thousands of tons of rock and concrete blocks into the river to raise the level of water by mere centimeters.

There have been many such shutdowns in recent decades, going back to at least 2003. The heat wave that year led to multiple reactors being shut down in France, and the Cernavoda nuclear plant in Romania. Since then, heatwaves have forced temporary shutdowns of reactors or reductions in their power output across Europe in nine of the past 20 years. A 2021 study found climate-related outages at nuclear power plants increased dramatically between the 1990s and 2010s. Far from remaining exceptional phenomena, interruptions to plant availability and losses of production have become a constant.

Heat and drought aren’t the only challenges to securing enough water for cooling. The long list of nuclear facilities that have been forced to shut down after jellyfish clogged water intake pipes includes Scotland’s Torness nuclear plant in 2011 and 2021; South Korea’s Hanul nuclear plant in 2021; St. Lucie nuclear plant in Florida in 2011; Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California in 2008, and many more. Following the shutdown of the Gravelines nuclear plant in France last year, operator EDF invested more than 1.5 million euros to surveil jellyfish populations in the North Sea. Despite continuous monitoring, the arrival of thousands of jellyfish led to the shutdown of three reactors at the Gravelines nuclear plant yet again this summer. Jellyfish swarms are expected to become more frequent as climate change intensifies, for multiple reasons.

If too little water is a problem for nuclear reactors, too much water—hurricanes and floods, for instance—is also a problem. When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States in 2012, the Salem-1 reactor in New Jersey had to be shut down “after debris blocked its cooling water intakes and caused four of its six circulating water pumps to stop working.” In 2009, heavy rainfall led to severe flooding in Rhône Valley resulting in the emergency shutdown of the Cruas nuclear plant in France as the cooling water intake of the plant was clogged by debris.

Severe weather events, including floods, winds, and wildfires, are a hazard to the safe operation of nuclear plants because such events can disable safety systems. In August 2020, a derecho in Iowa caused extensive damage to the Duane Arnold nuclear plant’s cooling towers, forcing its permanent shutdown ahead of its scheduled decommissioning. Natural disasters and extreme weather can also complicate the response to any accident or near-accident.

Climate change is already causing “more frequent and intense extreme events.” Unanticipated shutdowns will increase in frequency as extreme weather events driven by climate change become more common. One study found that “the average frequency of climate-induced disruptions” grew from “0.2 outage per reactor-year in the 1990s to 1.5 in the past decade” (i.e., 2010s). Going by the record so far, this decade will likely record a higher number of outages.

Can this trend be arrested by technology? Nuclear plants could, in principle, adopt other ways of removing the heat. For example, they could build cooling towers with recirculating water or use large electric fans to circulate air and carry away the heat. But these methods would lower the plant’s efficiency, and decrease the power output of reactors. And they would make nuclear power—already among the most expensive sources of electricity—more costly.

For nuclear power plants to be reliable, they need operating conditions to be stable. With climate change intensifying by the year, one cannot expect predictability, control, and stability.

Maintaining the promise of reliability in this changing environment is not only becoming increasingly difficult, but when operators and regulators attempt to keep this promise, it increases the risk of accidents due to more hazardous operating conditions and exacerbates the environmental footprint of nuclear reactors.

September 9, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

How climate change threatens Europe’s nuclear renaissance

European governments are planning to fight climate change with a major
expansion of nuclear power. Global warming, however, is fighting back. The
continent’s ambitions for boosting atomic power generation, a central
part of government efforts to meet net-zero goals and rising electricity
demand, collided this summer with the effects of climate change.

Wilting heat waves and worsening drought plunged European river levels to record
lows in August, depriving nuclear plants of the water needed to cool their
reactors. The resulting shutdowns and production cuts prompted some
governments and companies to question whether their multi-billion-euro
plans to build new plants should be adjusted to account for the rising
threats of climate-related disasters.

 Politico 1st Sept 2026,
https://www.politico.eu/article/climate-change-threatens-europe-nuclear-renaissance/

September 6, 2026 Posted by | climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

Heatwaves and secret emissions: Why nuclear power may not be as ‘green’ as you think

“The bulky concrete structures mean that it has a large amount of embodied carbon and, of course, it is not a renewable energy as it requires the mining of uranium, bringing with it carbon costs in terms of extraction and transport,” says Dr Bettina.

“Nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning must also be factored into the carbon budget of nuclear energy generation.”

By Liam Gilliver,  01/09/2026 , https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/01/heatwaves-and-secret-emissions-why-nuclear-power-may-not-be-as-green-as-you-think

The war on Iran has triggered calls to double down on nuclear power. But is it really ‘clean’, can Europe’s energy grid cope and will it survive the wrath of climate change?

The world stood still on 11 March 2011, when a major earthquake triggered a 15-metre tsunami that left an unforgettable scar on Japan’s east coast.

A series of powerful waves ripped through homes, businesses and roads – leaving more than 450,000 people homeless and killing 15,500. Alongside the chaos, the tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, spewing out toxic, radioactive materials and forcing thousands to evacuate.

The event triggered global conversation about the safety of nuclear energy, leading several countries to plan to phase out nuclear energy or stop its expansion.

But 15 years later and the horrors of Fukushima have slowly been replaced with calls to double down on nuclear power, particularly following the war on Iran and its subsequent energy crisis. Speaking exclusively to Euronews, EU Climate Action Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra listed nuclear as one of the power sources EU countries must lean on.

However, an expert from the University of Oxford has warned that new nuclear capacity will not fix today’s energy problems – urging policy makers to consider the true risks of nuclear.

“In the high‑renewables systems of Europe, the problem is increasingly not how to generate more electricity but how to access it when and where it’s needed,” says Dr Bettina Wittneben, a lecturer in Management at Oxford’s Saïd Business School and associate fellow at Pembroke College and the School of Geography and the Environment.

Is nuclear power really ‘clean’?

Nuclear energy is often touted as a clean form of energy as it is low carbon at the point of generation.

In layman’s terms, nuclear reactors can create electricity without releasing carbon dioxide or smog-forming pollutants into the atmosphere. However, experts point out that this isn’t the full picture.

“The bulky concrete structures mean that it has a large amount of embodied carbon and, of course, it is not a renewable energy as it requires the mining of uranium, bringing with it carbon costs in terms of extraction and transport,” says Dr Bettina.

“Nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning must also be factored into the carbon budget of nuclear energy generation.”

Are nuclear power plants climate resilient?

Europe was scorched by back-to-back heatwaves this summer, which experts say would have been “virtually impossible” if it weren’t for climate change. The extreme heat, combined with scant rainfall, triggered droughts across much of the continent, draining some of Europe’s biggest rivers to record-level lows.

This forced several nuclear power plants to temporarily shut off or be set to a reduced output across France, Hungary and Romania.

Nuclear requires vast amounts of water, particularly for the cooling process, and is often known as the “thirstiest power source”. According to The Nuclear Energy Institute, one nuclear reactor requires between 1,514 and 2,725 litres of water per MWh – equating to hundreds of gigalitres every year.

It’s why nuclear power plants are often built near large bodies of water. Without a constant, reliable source of water a nuclear reactor risks overheating – which could lead to serious core damage and end up releasing harmful radiation into the environment.

Coal power and hydropower also suffered during the heatwave, but a surge in solar power helped meet heightened electricity demand from cooling devices such as air conditioning.

According to energy think-tank Ember, solar output in European countries rose by up to 17 per cent on heatwave days in June and July – becoming the only major power source to perform “better than usual” during hot weather.

‘Hellbrise’: Nuclear is not as reliable as some say

Intermittent forms of energy such as wind and solar are often blamed for overloading Europe’s outdated energy grid.

When electricity demand outstrips supply, surplus energy is often wasted – and can lead to negative electricity prices. This is often referred to as ‘Hellbrise’ (hell= bright, brise= breeze) and can occur on sunny, windy days.

“This is also the narrative of fossil fuel advocates, who present fossil gas as the saviour of the baseload, or the electricity that is available when renewables fall short,” says Dr Wittneben.

“Fossil fuel sceptics point instead to nuclear power as a reliable baseload technology.”

However, the expert points out that nuclear power plants are slow and costly to turn off, which means they only “amplify” the grid’s Hellbrise challenge – rather than present a solution to it.

The EU has recognised that battery energy storage systems (BESS) are a “crucial technology” to help prevent renewable energy from being wasted or entering sub-zero pricing. The logic is that batteries can store electricity produced by renewables during the day (when consumption tends to be low) and release it to households when demand increases in the evening.

Europe installed 36 GWh of new BESS in 2025, bringing its total operational capacity beyond 100 GWh for the first time. This is enough stored energy to power around 75 million homes.

Which EU countries have become reliant on nuclear power?

Continue reading →

September 4, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Europe’s Heatwaves Are Putting Nuclear Power Under Pressure

By Haley Zaremba – Aug 26, 2026, https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Europes-Heatwaves-Are-Putting-Nuclear-Power-Under-Pressure.html

  • Extreme heat and drought are cutting nuclear and hydropower output just as cooling demand increases electricity consumption.
  • Hungary’s Paks plant fell to barely 10% of capacity, while heat and environmental constraints have repeatedly curtailed French nuclear generation.
  • Europe will need more storage, flexible demand, resilient grids and climate-adapted power plants to cope with hotter summers.

Europe’s energy sector is facing a stress test unlike any it has ever seen before. Not only are the markets being battered by the latest in a long succession of geopolitical supply chain snags thanks to the war in Iran, but the continent is also facing blistering heat waves that are pushing the grid to its absolute limit and increasing the risk of rolling blackouts when temperatures are dangerously high. As the fastest warming continent in the world, Europe needs to adjust to extreme heat as the new normal, and it needs to adapt its power supply accordingly.

“We have to plan our power system so that this might be our new reality,” Zsuzsanna Pató, power system lead for Europe at the non-profit Regulatory Assistance Project, recently told Bloomberg. “We don’t usually have such hot spells, but we just have to get used to it.”


The nuclear industry is facing the hardest test of all, with rising temperatures forcing reactors offline just when their output is most needed. Many nuclear power plants rely on rivers for their cooling systems, and when rivers are too hot or the waters are too low, operators are forced to reduce or shut down output altogether. Earlier this month, Hungary had to reduce output at the Paks nuclear power plant to just over 10 percent and just barely avoided total shutdown, which would have effectively cut off 40 percent of the country’s electricity generation overnight. Even though the Paks plant was never fully taken offline, the sharp reduction in production led to an enormous swing in electricity prices across the region, reaching a blistering €500 a megawatt-hour. And the hottest weeks of the summer could still be yet to come.

In July, France had to reduce output and shut down nuclear reactors at a record pace without sufficient and safe water supplies to cool its reactors as the country recorded its hottest day ever on record. While this might seem to suggest that nuclear power development is incompatible with rising temperatures without overhauling the way we cool them, some experts contend that these reductions are a symptom of policy rather than technological limitations. 

“What the heatwave revealed was not a failure of nuclear technology, but rather a narrow, well-understood constraint in how some riverside plants are allowed to operate during extreme heat,” The Conversation recently reported. Furthermore, despite curbing output at reactors across the country, France still had “sufficient generation capacity to meet electricity demand,” according to grid operator RTE.

However, the reduction did have critical impacts on consumers within and outside of France. “It is true that prices rose, exports to neighbouring countries fell, and the grid relied more heavily on gas as well as oil-fired reserve generation,” The Conversation conceded. “Yet these were temporary strains, and at no point was France’s supply in any kind of serious jeopardy.”

However, price spikes and energy poverty are a major concern for consumers, who can expect heat waves to keep getting hotter and more frequent. And turning down the air conditioning is not an option when the mercury is this high. A study from The Lancet found that nearly half a million people in the world died of heat every year between 2000 and 2019, most of whom were elderly. Under these conditions, air conditioning is not a luxury but a life-saving necessity, preventing an estimated 190,000 deaths each year.

Utilities therefore need to adapt their models to account for the changing climate as well as for continued geopolitical volatility, both of which are wreaking havoc on energy markets and squeezing consumers. “Utilities can adapt by planning for summer peaks, making cooling demand more flexible, reinforcing grids for high temperatures, deploying batteries and demand response, and climate-proofing power plants’ cooling systems,” Simone Tagliapietra, senior fellow at economic and policy think tank Bruegel, recently told MIT Technology Review.

August 30, 2026 Posted by | climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

Romania steps up efforts to restart Cernavoda nuclear reactors

By Iulian Ernst in Bucharest August 24, 2026, https://www.intellinews.com/romania-steps-up-efforts-to-restart-cernavoda-nuclear-reactors-462977/

Romanian authorities are changing their approach to restoring water levels at the Cernavoda nuclear power plant, with national waterways management company Apele Romane (Romanian Waters) building a temporary dam on the Danube and state-controlled hydropower group Hidroelectrica releasing additional water from its Olt River reservoirs to support the restart of at least one of the two reactors currently offline, according to G4Media and Radio Romania.

The measures follow several weeks of emergency interventions that included dredging and attempts to sink barges loaded with stone in an effort to raise water levels near the nuclear plant’s intake. Those measures produced insufficient results, leaving Romania dependent on more expensive electricity imports during peak consumption hours.

Under the revised strategy, Apele Romane is constructing a transverse guide dam on the Old Danube arm to redirect water towards the intake channel serving the plant. Emergency dredging is continuing in the Cernavoda area under the coordination of the Lower Danube River Administration and Apele Romane.

Hidroelectrica has meanwhile started releasing additional water from reservoirs on the Olt River. According to Antena 3, the company can release around 50 cubic metres per second for five days, although water reserves in the Olt system have also been reduced following several months of drought.

The Ministry of National Defence has resumed support for the emergency works. Military specialists will carry out topobathymetric and geodetic measurements, while military divers will participate in underwater interventions.

The effectiveness of the measures remains constrained by the exceptionally low flow of the Danube. Water entering Romania’s section of the river is currently around 1,300 cubic metres per second, roughly one-third of the multi-annual average.

According to the forecast for August 22-29, the flow is expected to remain at around this level for the first three days before gradually increasing to approximately 1,550 cubic metres per second. The expected natural increase would therefore provide considerably more water than the temporary releases from the Olt reservoirs.

The engineering works could eventually have a larger effect by improving the flow towards the nuclear plant’s intake, but their impact is unlikely to be sufficient immediately. This leaves the timing of a reactor restart dependent primarily on the availability of adequate cooling water.

Cernavoda’s two reactors, each with an installed capacity of 680 MW, have been taken offline because of insufficient Danube water for cooling. Their prolonged outage has increased Romania’s reliance on electricity imports during a period of high summer consumption. Out of the 7,500 MW consumed by Romania during the peak hours, it imports 1,00-2,500 MW.

August 29, 2026 Posted by | business and costs, climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

California´s last working nuclear power plant sits in a landscape that would worry any firefighter when the wind picks up.

Federal wildfire crews are stretched thin. California is stepping in to help

By ASSOCIATED PRESS, 26 August 2026

California´s last working nuclear power plant sits cradled in a landscape that would worry any firefighter when the wind picks up.

The Pacific Ocean and its perpetual fog lick the western edge of the coastal bluffs holding the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. But the Irish Hills rise steeply to its east – their slopes rugged, dark with scrub and oak. Difficult to access, and full of fuel.

“Any fire within the Diablo power plant area could be catastrophic,” said Dave Erickson, a division chief and forester with the Cal Fire San Luis Obispo unit. The property, he said, is in a very high fire severity zone. “So we just take precautions.”

It´s one of the many places where California is now stepping into federal gaps created by Congress´ long-term underinvestment in fuels management on federal lands, the Trump administration´s cuts, and firefighters stretched thin by blazes raging across the West.

A local organization with state funding, the San Luis Obispo County Community Fire Safe Council, started carving a fuel break into the surrounding ridgelines. And Erickson put his crews to work closing the gaps, to create a critical toehold for firefighters to get ahead of flames………………………………….

The stakes are high for California, where wildfires have burned through millions of acres in the last decade – killing more than 220 people, hastening the deaths of tens of thousands more, and racking up tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

But the costs are high, too. California has spent nearly half a billion dollars in grants for wildfire resilience and forest health projects on federal lands since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, according to the California Natural Resources Agency…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
https://www.dailymail.com/wires/ap/article-16079773/Federal-wildfire-crews-stretched-California-stepping-help.html

August 29, 2026 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

Mission impossible? Quantifying military emissions

Military and wartime emissions are difficult to track—but too important to ignore.

Bulletin, By Neta C. Crawford, August 24, 2026

ow much does war, and the preparation and recovery from it, contribute to the climate crisis? Nobody knows, because there is no comprehensive accounting of global warming emissions from militaries, military industries, or war. While some military emissions are reported, those are the tip of the iceberg. The failure to quantify the emissions from this sector inhibits the ability to reduce them and keeps them largely sacrosanct.

One can make some educated guesses as to what they may be, which I’ve attempted here. This rough estimate—which is on the conservative side—shows that US and global military, military-industrial, and wartime emissions are enormous and should be factored into our understanding of global warming. 

The procedures and criteria for nations to make a comprehensive report of their greenhouse emissions were first worked out as part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol Treaty process.

A 1997 Pentagon memo—a piece of rhetorical genius—explained the stakes very clearly: The military was the US government’s single largest fossil fuel user. Ensuring the US military remained preeminent in the world required unlimited fuel use for training and operations. Reporting emissions could lead to a push for reductions, and “limitations on tactical and strategic military systems would … adversely impact operations and readiness.”

The Pentagon argued that even a 10 percent reduction in fuel use would harm military readiness and “represent a serious threat to national security.”

To forestall this, the Pentagon suggested draft language for the Kyoto treaty proposing that parties “shall exclude from its measurement of anthropogenic emissions by sources any emissions attributable to military tactical or strategic systems used for military operations in support of national or collective security, humanitarian activities, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, or United Nations, NATO, and other multinational actions.” The Pentagon also proposed excluding measurement of any “emissions attributable to military tactical or strategic systems used in training” for those operations.

The Defense Department also asserted that “to minimize fundamental conflicts between national security and global environmental protection, the Protocol itself must address military operations and readiness so that the [sic] we can pursue and enjoy the fruits of national security as well as the benefits of a healthy planet.”

The White House agreed, and the United States successfully lobbied to exempt most military emissions from countries’ annual National Inventory Reports of greenhouse gas emissions.

Even though military emissions reporting was made voluntary in 2015 at the UN’s climate conference in Paris, there is still no comprehensive accounting of direct military emissions by all countries. But even if and when those institutional numbers are reported, most accounting is still partial because it undercounts military emissions and excludes the emissions from military industry and war. Every uncounted metric ton is an obstacle to grasping the full scale of the problem and hampers the ability to reduce the worst effects of warming.

US military emissions. The US Defense Department is still the single largest energy user and institutional greenhouse gas emitter in the country. And that is before we account for all the national security related emissions that are counted as emissions in other departments. Indeed, as I show below, there are significant military related emissions that are essentially under or uncounted…………………………………………………………………….

But most significantly, Defense Department emissions have fallen because many of its functions are now essentially off-book, as the US military has increasingly outsourced its operations to contractors.

Nearly 4,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent is a large quantity, but this is a conservative estimate since the Defense Department, which provides the data to the Energy Department, uses a lower 100-year Global Warming Potential for methane than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. My estimate also does not include the Defense Department’s biogenic emissions (from organic waste decay), which averaged .78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from 2010 to 2024………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

States will deliberately destroy the forests of their enemies. The United States used chemicals, bombardment, and plows to destroy 417,000 hectares (roughly 1,600 square miles) of tropical forests and mangroves of Southern Vietnam during the Vietnam War, releasing an estimated 183.6 – 535.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. An additional 5.6 million hectares (or 21,600 square miles) of forests were partially destroyed. If damaged forests are not regrown, their sequestration potential is reduced or even eliminated…………………………………………………………..

More concerning perhaps are the ways that war contributes to fugitive methane emissions—from slow leaks, deliberate venting, and accidents—that are already a large source of warming. Methane has a 29.8 times higher global warming potential on a 100-year time scale than carbon dioxide. War related emissions of methane, which vary depending on the source and cause of the emissions, largely go uncounted. During the 1991 Gulf War, one location, Mansoria station in northern Kuwait, recorded a 50 percent increase in atmospheric methane due to a fire set by Iraq.

Oil infrastructure continues to be targeted now, regardless of the long-term environmental consequences. The diagram below, from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Targeting publication, illustrates all the options the United States considers available for targeting oil infrastructure…………………………………………………………………………………………..

A team of scholars led by Ben Neimark has attempted to estimate the emissions of all phases of the Israel-Gaza war from pre-conflict, conflict, and reconstruction. The immediate human toll was staggering: Tens of thousands of people killed, millions displaced, and health care infrastructure in Gaza gutted. They estimate that “emissions from the open conflict surpassed 1.3 million tons CO2 equiv by January 2025,” but that including pre-war mobilization and post-war reconstruction, emissions from this war may be as high as 33 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Both these wars illustrate how the effects of military emissions extend beyond borders. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused increased military spending and military industrialization not only in Russia and Ukraine, but also in NATO, and increased global arms manufacturing as countries rush to supply Ukraine with weapons, much of which will outlast the war once it ends. Similarly, the Israel-Gaza war, which includes Israeli attacks in Lebanon and other countries, has generated increased military mobilization in the Middle East as well as increased arms sales. It may be fair to say that, since war became industrialized—if we take greenhouse gas emissions into account—there is no longer such thing as a purely local or regional war………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Why don’t we have the military and military-industrial data, and why do the impacts of war on emissions remain largely unexamined? On one level, as harmful as wartime greenhouse gas emissions may be, they are essentially not covered under either the laws of war or international humanitarian law. The 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques is focused on “the deliberate manipulation of natural processes—the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.” The greenhouse gas emissions of war are an unintended, albeit foreseeable and now foreseen side effect of combat.

Just as political leaders often aver that wars will be short, effective, decisive, cheap, and controllable—even if war is rarely any of those things—they assume that the environmental consequences of mobilization, armaments, and war are local, even trivial externalities, without long-term consequences that can change the planet itself. Indeed, in some respects, as soon as war and military industry began to be powered by fossil fuels in the 19th century, there was no longer any such thing as a purely “local” war.

Policymakers tend to assume that national security, understood as military security, is the sine qua non of survival. As the 1997 Pentagon memo urging that most or all military emissions be exempt from reporting explained, “We must not sacrifice our national security to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We must not see this as an issue of being able to achieve either national security or protection of the global climate.” But to a certain extent, nonreporting, and the failure to count all other military, military-industrial, and war related emissions, may have done just that—put military capability and American preeminence above survival, and thus jeopardized the latter. https://thebulletin.org/2026/08/mission-impossible-quantifying-military-emissions/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=How%20much%20does%20war%20contribute%20to%20the%20climate%20crisis%3F&utm_campaign=20260824%20Monday%20Newsletter

August 27, 2026 Posted by | climate change, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Romania adopts new measures to boost Danube waters to cool Cernavoda nuclear plant

By Reuters, August 22, 2026, Reporting ​by Marek Strzelecki, Editing by Alexandra Hudson https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/romania-adopts-new-measures-boost-danube-waters-cool-cernavoda-nuclear-plant-2026-08-22/

WARSAW, Aug 22 (Reuters) – Romania’s National Committee for Emergency Situations approved new measures to ​boost the water level of ‌the River Danube and ensure cooling of the Cernavoda nuclear power plant, the ​government press office said on Saturday.

The ​plant remains shut due to historically ⁠low Danube levels and the ​country has declared a state of emergency ​throughout August stemming from a decline in electricity production.

  • Emergency dredging of the Danube course in ​the plant area is planned.
  • Along ​the Old Danube channel a groyne will be ‌built ⁠to divert water towards the area of the water intake for the cooling systems of the plant.
  • Hydro plant ​operator Hidroelectrica ​will ⁠begin releasing water from reservoirs on the River Olt ​on Saturday for five days ​to ⁠supplement Danube flow and generate extra electricity.
  • High-capacity pumps will be mobilized to maintain, ⁠if ​needed, the water ​level necessary for the operation of the plant.

August 26, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Bulgaria’s Kozloduy nuclear plant cuts output because of Danube drought

First time in plant’s 52-year history that extreme weather conditions forced reduce output

Aysu Biçer, 20 August 2026,
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/bulgarias-kozloduy-nuclear-plant-cuts-output-because-of-danube-drought/4033319

Bulgaria’s Kozloduy nuclear power plant will reduce output from one of its reactors as the Danube River level continues to fall amid an unprecedented drought, Bulgarian News Agency BTA reported Thursday.

The energy ministry said it would “preventively lower the output of Kozloduy’s Unit 5 by some 120 MW on August 21” to ensure the plant’s safe operation.

Unit 5 has a generating capacity of just over 1,000 MW.

It is the first time in the plant’s 52-year history that extreme weather conditions have forced it to reduce output, the report underlined.

The ministry said the Danube was forecast to continue receding in the Bulgarian section of the river.

Kozloduy uses Danube water to cool steam in condensers in the non-nuclear part of the plant. The river is not used to cool nuclear reactors.

Water is supplied through the plant’s shore-based pumping station, which was designed to maintain the necessary supply even when river levels are low.

A crisis management working group was established at Kozloduy in early June as water levels began to fall and forecasts indicated prolonged drought across western and central Europe.

The plant has continued operating normally and supporting the national and regional energy system, said the ministry, while several nuclear plants along the Danube have reduced output or shut down.

Hungary’s Paks nuclear plant reduced production to critically low levels earlier this month as the Danube reached record lows.

In Romania, Unit 1 of the Cernavoda nuclear plant was shut down at the end of July, while a nationwide state of heightened alert was declared in the energy sector for August.

August 25, 2026 Posted by | Bulgaria, climate change | Leave a comment

Drought, heat – and jellyfish: Climate change is causing problems for the French nuclear power plant fleet

 13 nuclear reactors have had to shut down. Solar energy has so far compensated for the loss – at least during the day.

Heat waves and drought have led to the shutdown of several French
nuclear reactors, while strong solar power generation has helped stabilize
the grid. As photovoltaic capacity declines after sunset, battery storage
could help meet the high evening demand and reduce dependence on
electricity generation from gas-fired power plants.

The combined effects of
heat wave and drought have led to the shutdown of 13 French nuclear
reactors by mid-August; this corresponds to 20.4 percent of the country’s
total nuclear power capacity. This is the highest level since 2015, reports
the French news agency AFP. The state-owned energy supplier EDF justifies
the shutdowns with “environmental restrictions” and “external environmental
factors”.

 Focus Online 19th Aug 2026, https://www.focus.de/earth/energie/minus-20-prozent-frankreich-akws-fallen-reihenweise-aus-solar-springt-ein_f45e9bcc-c370-4ea0-8759-c097efb4bcb2.html

August 24, 2026 Posted by | climate change, France | Leave a comment

The vast impacts of a dry Danube

By Victoria Heath, Geographical 20th Aug 2026

Emergency engineering works are underway in the Danube in Hungary to prevent critically low river levels from shutting down the nation’s key nuclear power plant, which provides Hungary with more than one-third of its electricity.

Due to extreme heat, the Danube has reached a record low this month – falling within 8 centimetres of its previous record low – impacting power production at the Paks nuclear plant. Typically, nuclear power plants are built near rivers and coastlines to use water to cool the reactors.

Two 80-metre (260-foot) barges in the river will be sunk by Hungarian authorities to raise water levels so that Paks can continue its normal operations. Currently, it is operating at just 25 per cent of its capacity.

The water is so low in the Danube that around twenty German World War II shipwrecks still containing live ordnance – sunk around eighty years ago – have surfaced on the riverbed.

‘European rivers are already sick,’ said conservationist at Riverwatch Ulrich Eichelmann. ‘This heat wave makes the damage more visible.’

According to the Hungarian government, plans to restore the water level of the Danube – Europe’s second-longest river – include building a submerged, dam-like structure in the riverbed known as a riverbed sill – a process that will take weeks.

Last week, neighbouring Romania shut down its last operating nuclear reactor due to low water levels in the Danube…………………………………………………….. https://geographical.co.uk/news/the-vast-impacts-of-a-dry-danube

August 24, 2026 Posted by | climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

Heatwave hell

Fires and droughts could not spell out more clearly why nuclear power is the worst kind of risk under climate crisis conditions, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

 beyondnuclearinternational , August 16, 2026, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/08/16/heatwave-hell/

You would think after the last several weeks we just had, the promoters of nuclear power might be tempering their messages a little. Or even reconsidering their position if they haven’t yet drunk too many gallons of the nuclear Kool-Aid.

But what we are seeing instead is a continued and relentless propaganda campaign re-affirming the “milestones” and “breakthroughs” of new nuclear power projects.

For example, Deep Fission, with its plans to try to drop what could eventually be as many as 100 15MW micro reactors down mile-deep boreholes in the tiny community of Parsons, Kansas (population 9,600), crowed about a recent approval from the US Department of Energy.

What the DOE approved was the company’s Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for its Gravity™ Nuclear Reactor. Deep Fission described this as “a major regulatory milestone.”

What it really amounts to is permission to keep on doodling on the napkin, or, put less snarkily, that they may proceed with their reactor design.

Holtec, the New Jersey-based waste and decommissioning company announced late last month that with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) having granted a License Termination Plan for the closed Oyster Creek Generating Station, the company can now move forward with plans to site four of its SMR-300 reactors at the site. 

Collectively, this represents a bigger output than the old 650 MW Oyster Creek reactor, but of course SMR owners are claiming that because their reactors are so much smaller, there need be no emergency evacuation zone or other disaster preparedness beyond the property fence line.

Because after all, what kind of disaster could possibly occur?

Evidently, none of these reactor bros touting their scammy crypto-nukes have been watching the news, since they are just carrying on as if Nothing Happened. 

So what didn’t they see? The Romanians dynamiting the Danube river in a desperate attempt to redirect the ever scarcer river water toward their lone Cernavoda nuclear power plant? One reactor there was already closed and now the second one is, as well, as the Danube suffered another drastic drop in water level.

That in turn has affected neighboring Moldova which “relies on Romanian power to cover up to 60% of its own electricity shortages,” according to reporting in The Guardian. The loss of Cernavoda could result in power outages, Moldovan authorities warned.

In Hungary, the Paks nuclear power plant was operating at around 10% of its 2,000 MW capacity at time of writing and the Hungarians, like the Romanians, were starting to sink large barges in what is left of the Danube to try to raise water levels and continue to cool the plant.

Then there was the scorched heathland and billowing smoke that obscured the view of the Sizewell nuclear power plant on the English coast just a few miles away. The raging wildfire close to the still operating Sizewell B reactor was a close call, another stroke of luck with the wind blowing the other way. That day. 

The nearby precious Minsmere Nature Reserve hasn’t been so lucky, with the fires causing a massive loss of wildlife and habitat. But plans to proceed with the two French Sizewell C EPR reactors have not been abandoned and the UK government insanely granted Sizewell B a 20-year license extension on top of its existing one that would allow it to operate out to 2055. 

The plant actually sits on the beach, never mind the fact that climate crisis-caused drastic sea-level rise is an empirical inevitability. And, apparently, never mind the wildfires either, which, with the United Kingdom now in its fifth scorching heatwave of the summer, are only likely to get larger and more frequent.

Maybe the nuke bros also missed the people fleeing for their lives across Europe while headlines reminded these hapless refugees and others roasting in cities, towns and countryside that their nuclear power plants would not be available to provide the much-needed electricity at a time it was needed most. Instead, people sweltered, and, in some cases, died, from the extreme heat, their villages in some places burned to the ground.

France had to power down and even close many of its reactors due to the extreme heat and then, of course, came the climate change-caused jellyfish swarm at Gravelines, now looking to be an annual event, causing those reactors to close. Jellyfish are a problem because they clog the cooling water intake system.

Meanwhile, parts of the US have been on fire, too, while smoke from Canadian wildfires a few weeks back enveloped a large swath of the Midwest and Northeast in a choking cloud of acrid smoke and falling ash.

So far, and fortunately, there have been no nuclear power plants in the paths of these fires — or some of the catastrophic flooding, including in Texas. 

But it really doesn’t stretch the imagination too much to picture a very different scenario. 

Nuclear power plants can’t operate well — or sometimes at all— in extreme heat or drought because they require water to cool them and that water needs actually to be cool in the first place. And available. 

If the water is too hot or too scarce, nuclear power plants have to reduce power or even shut down altogether.

But when they do, it’s not like turning off a car engine. Because of the highly radioactive and thermally hot fuel inside nuclear reactors —and the fuel pools into which the irradiated fuel rods have been offloaded — they still need cooling. If you can’t cool them, they will eventually melt down. So water must continue to be available and so must electricity to get it there and power the plant.

That is why we have argued for years that nuclear power plants are not reliable, especially in extreme weather conditions. Instead, they are a liability. And with ever more violent weather conditions under the climate crisis, those risks are only going to get worse and disaster more likely.

The events on March 11, 2011 in Japan would have been infinitely less catastrophic, and a whole lot less expensive, if they hadn’t involved a triple nuclear meltdown along with the massive earthquake and tsunami. And, as with Sizewell, they would have been infinitely worse radiologically, had the wind been blowing the other way. Despite this, vast areas received radioactive fallout, complicating rescue efforts of those caught in the earthquake and/or the tsunami.

Fire is one of the biggest risks at a nuclear power plant, largely because of the lethal radioactive inventory on the site. “Irradiation produces a variety of fission products and actinides that multiply the radioactivity in the original uranium fuel by more than 100 million times,” according to The World Nuclear Waste Report (see page 27) published in 2019 by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. All of this waste currently remains at US reactor sites and at most such around the world, absent a safe, long-term storage solution.

If a raging wildfire engulfed a reactor site, the outcome could be catastrophic, rendering vast areas uninhabitable. Another Chernobyl Zone could be born.

Fire is one of the biggest risks at a nuclear power plant, largely because of the lethal radioactive inventory on the site. “Irradiation produces a variety of fission products and actinides that multiply the radioactivity in the original uranium fuel by more than 100 million times,” according to The World Nuclear Waste Report (see page 27) published in 2019 by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. All of this waste currently remains at US reactor sites and at most such around the world, absent a safe, long-term storage solution.

If a raging wildfire engulfed a reactor site, the outcome could be catastrophic, rendering vast areas uninhabitable. Another Chernobyl Zone could be born.

August 19, 2026 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

It’s Getting So Hot That Nuclear Plants Are Being Forced to Power Down

Governments are freaking out.

By Joe Wilkins Aug 14, 2026 , https://futurism.com/science-energy/europe-heat-wave-water-nuclear-plants

Nuclear energy is often touted as an ultra-efficient alternative to dirtier energy sources like coal or natural gas. Expanding the world’s capacity for atomic power is the key to avoiding a cascading climate disaster, some of the industry’s proponents say — but what if it’s too late?

With record setting heatwaves scorching Europe, water levels in the continent’s major rivers are reaching all-time lows. While receding water levels are a huge boon for European archeologists as ancient ruins surface for the first time in centuries, the situation is causing massive headaches for nuclear engineers, who have had to scramble to power down nuclear energy facilities across the continent.

As German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported, facilities like the two gigawatt Paks nuclear plant in Hungary have come close to powering down completely, as a critical lack of water flowing from the Danube threatened the facility’s ability to cool its reactors. That’s a major crisis, because in any given year, the Paks plant generates nearly half of the country’s total electricity supply.

The Hungarian government is now scrambling to keep things running, ABC reported, mobilizing engineers to deliver some 145,000 cubic meters of rocks into the riverbed to manually slow the current and conserve water upstream.

The situation isn’t much better in Romania, where the state-owned nuclear power producer may be forced to completely shut down its last remaining reactor, per Reuters. That’s not for lack of trying: earlier this month, the Romanian navy detonated 180 kilograms of explosives meant to redirect water from the Danube to cool its nuclear reactors.

Meanwhile in France, a combination of extreme drought and a recurring jellyfish invasion have reduced the nation’s nuclear energy production by 20 percent, though a more diversified energy grid means the situation isn’t quite as hairy as those in Hungary or Romania.

With yet another heat wave already on the horizon, Europe’s nuclear energy woes may really just be the tip of the iceberg.

August 18, 2026 Posted by | climate change, EUROPE | Leave a comment

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