I think there was probably more energy dissipated on this reject than in a heavy weight landing. This reject was done at a speed higher than 80 kts, which is normaly used as a "soft V1", where an abort is only started for mor serious mishaps. This suggests that it was a maximum effort stop.
I've never flown an airbus, but on the 744 the RTO setting of the AB would have kicked in, which would have applied almost maximum braking. Being that you never use such a strong brake setting on landing (normal conditions), I would say that this aircraft was dealing with much more stress on the brakes than a normal landing.
Now, the article reports that the crew talked about delaying take-off due to hot brakes. That would mean that they probably had some indication on the cockpit and that they had to wait until the brakes cooled to get the brakes below a certain value in order to be able to take-off. The real question is if they actually waited for that temp to be within limits, or if they decided to take-off even though it was "close enough" to the required limit. If they did decide to go with it over the limit, the higher altitude and possibly higher temp or even low rated tires could have been enough to melt the plugs or just plain blow the tires apart.
Just speculating. All this information should be easily extracted from the black boxes. Will follow this closely to see the results.
