Thursday, June 02, 2011
Inside the Kuosheng nuclear power plant in Taiwan
Millions of people around the world could find themselves in the same predicament as the 172,000 Japanese who were forced to evacuate their homes because they lived within 30 kilometers (19 miles) of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant when it suffered radiation leaks.
An assessment performed by Nature magazine and the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University of the 211 nuclear plants in existence today found that two-thirds of them have more people living within a 30-kilometer radius than those within the same distance of the Fukushima plant.
Twenty-one plants have populations larger than one million within that radius, and six have populations larger than three million.
Pakistan’s KANUPP plant in Karachi has the most people (8.2 million) living within 30 kilometers. Fortunately for the Pakistanis, the plant has only one “relatively small reactor” (output of 125 megawatts), according to Nature.
But that’s not the case in Taiwan. The 1,933-megawatt Kuosheng plant has 5.5 million people within a 30-kilometer radius and the 1,208-megawatt Chin Shan plant has 4.7 million. Also, both plants are within range of the capital city of Taipei.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Reactors, Residents and Risk (by Declan Butler, Nature)
Google Earth Tool Shows Proximity of Nuclear Plants (by Suanne Rust, California Watch)
Nuclear Power Plant a ‘Disaster’: Contractor (by J. Michael Cole, Taipei Times)
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