About 90 million people worldwide live within 30km of a nuclear reactor, equivalent to the exclusion zone around Japan’s crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, a study released on Friday showed.
The US alone has nearly 16 million people within this range, followed by more than 9 million each in China, Germany and Pakistan, and 5 million to 6 million in Taiwan, India and France.
When the radius is expanded to 75km, the number of people potentially at risk in case of a nuclear accident jumps to nearly half a billion, according to the analysis published by Nature.
More than 110 million of those are in the US, 73 million in China, 57 million in India, 39 million in Germany and 33 million in Japan.
Looked at another way, more than a third of Americans live within 75km of a nuclear power plant, and nearly half of all Germans.
CONCENTRATION
Population concentration near a reactor is not a measure of danger, which depends on numerous factors including earthquake risk, quality of maintenance, regulatory oversight and the amount of radioactive material on site.
However, it does suggest how many people will be at risk if something does go terribly wrong, as happened in Fukushima and in Chernobyl 25 years ago, Nature said.
About 172,000 people lived in the 30km zone around the Japanese plant, which was hit by a magnitude 9.0 quake on March 11 and then, minutes later, a -devastating tsunami.
Two-thirds of the world’s 211 active nuclear power plants have populations within the same radius that exceed the number of residents forced to leave their homes in Japan, the analysis revealed.
AT RISK
There are 21 plants in the world with at least 1 million people within a radius of 30km and for six of those plants the nearby population exceeds 3 million.
At the Kanupp facility in Pakistan, the figure rises to more than 8 million people, though the reactor there is rather small, with an output of only 125 megawatts.
In contrast, the Guosheng and Jinshan plants in Taiwan — each with more than 5 million people within 30km — generate 1,933 and 1,208 megawatts, respectively.
At the broader radius of 75km, China’s Guangdong and Lingao plants top the list, casting a shadow over 28 million people each, including in Hong Kong.
food for thought
The analysis, co-designed by Declan Butler from Nature, was carried out in conjunction with NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), based at Columbia University in New York.
An interactive Google Earth map showing where each of the nuclear power plants is located and how many people live within different perimeters can be viewed on the Nature Web site.
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