Fresh off a month that saw all but five states mired in severe drought, the US is reeling from multiple crises of national proportions.

First, there’s the record-breaking heat dome which is currently baking most of the continental US. According to the Guardian, over 100 million Americans are currently living under extreme heat warnings, forecasted to persist well into the weekend.

At the same time, the country is being smoked out by dozens of wildfires across North America, a situation the heat wave isn’t exactly helping. On top of that, smoke from over 800 blazes in Canada is helping choke out the US Midwest and North-East, making the air hazardous to breathe.

Things aren’t necessarily any prettier outside of the smoke-zone — just wetter. Communities situated around the Guadalupe River in Texas are reeling after near endless rainfall triggered massive floods across the state for the second year in a row.

So far, at least one person is dead, while thousands have been forced to evacuate. At least 57 counties representing over six million people were placed under flood watches over the past few days. With even more rain on the horizon, it remains to be seen when Texas will get relief from the torrential downfalls.

Stepping back, it’s clear this cascade of extremes isn’t happening in a vacuum. The overlapping wildfires, floods, and heat waves are all being amplified by the same climate forces: a rapidly warming planet, fueled in no small part by skyrocketing carbon emissions from the US itself.

All in all, it’s been an action-packed summer as the El Niño cycle rolls on — and unfortunately, the devastation is far from over.

More on climate disaster: Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño

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Unsure what to do with your rancid old hot dog factory? Apparently, the answer is simple: turn it into a fusion reactor facility.

As TechCrunch reports, a company called Realta Fusion is building a fusion reactor inside an old Oscar Mayer hot dog factory in Wisconsin. The refurbished facility is called Forge, and according to Realta cofounder and CEO Kieran Furlong, it’s due to begin operations by 2029 to test whether fusion reactors can actually make a profit by generating more electricity than they require.

“From sausages to fusion,” Furlong told TechCrunch, touting Realta as Wisconsin’s nuclear “state champion.”

The company chose the site because of its “ample” access to power and its proximity to the startup’s existing headquarters.

Per TechCrunch, Realta recently demonstrated that it could generate electricity using a fusion device dubbed Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror, or WHAM for short, a successful experiment that the startup claimed as the first of its kind.

Put simply, nuclear reactors replicate the process our Sun uses to generate energy by fusing atoms together under extreme conditions. Realta’s WHAM uses a novel process called direct energy conversion (DEC), which extracts electricity from charged particles emitted by plasma. That sets it aside from other fusion reactor designs that capture heat to spin turbines and generate electricity.

Despite early promising results — scientists only recently started showing that fusion reactors can indeed generate a surplus of energy — we’re still far from proving that it’s a scalable and renewable source of electricity.

But that hasn’t stopped a flourishing cottage industry of fusion startups from trying. With backing from some of the most influential names in tech, from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, companies are promising a safer alternative to conventional nuclear fission reactors that can’t experience catastrophic meltdowns.

Even old hot dog factories are fair game as firms like Realta pursue the idea. Besides, we think that it’s only natural that Realta works on turning some old Oscar Mayer Weinermobiles into fusion-powered cars.

More on nuclear fusion: There’s a Glaring Safety Problem With Nuclear Energy Startups

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When Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE boys started snipping wires across DC, they took out critical programs like the government’s premier climate research website and the hurricane-hunter aircraft gathering data on dangerous storms.

While they were at it, the Trump administration also ripped up a project that would have vastly improved the country’s ability to monitor wildfires. The GeoXO program was a project originally encompassing six satellites that would greatly improve the resolution available to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor atmospheric conditions like wildfire smoke, as well as weather events like lightning strikes, and climate observations such as color changes in the ocean’s surface.

The six satellites were meant to encompass three regions split between the US West, Central, and East. Starting in April 2025, however, the Trump administration directed the NOAA to make drastic cuts to GeoXO. These included cutting two satellites from the mission altogether — scrapping the central observation region entirely — and canceling major contracts for existing GeoXO instruments. The purported goal was to refocus the program on a “core weather mission,” as opposed to long-term climate monitoring, following the administration’s broader attacks on any effort to mitigate or even mention climate change.

One of those cancelled instruments, the GeoXO Atmospheric Composition device, was a high-resolution spectrometer designed to give the NOAA advanced capabilities to monitor air pollutants, like ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and excess particulate matter. In the long term, the tool would have helped scientists paint a clearer picture of how particular weather events relate to broader climate shifts, an NOAA report explains.

Of course, the timing of the cancellation couldn’t have been worse. Huge swaths of the United States and Canada are currently being smoked out by noxious fumes emanating from hundreds of wildfires across North America.

Though the GeoXO program wouldn’t have gone live until the 2030s, Trump’s decision represents a devastating loss for our future ability to monitor this exact phenomenon, which is becoming something of an annual tradition for millions of people.

As Susan Anenberg, chair of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University observed, the NOAA “had spent years planning an air pollution instrument on the GeoXO satellite which would provide near-real-time, location-specific data on smoke levels, giving people the information they need to avoid exposure.”

Anenberg explained that the public health benefits this kind of monitoring would provide “could amount to about $13 billion per year.”

“As smoke events happen more often,” Anenberg continued, “we need more data, not less.”

More on Trump: Prices Already Spiking at Trump’s Mysterious Gas Stations That Promised Cheap Fuel

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