Fukushima: Could A Similar Disaster Strike Closer To Your Home?
Thursday, April 21, 2011 - 15:00
in Earth & Climate
If you're not one of the 172,000 Japanese people living within a dozen miles of the Fukushima Daiichi plant who have been advised (read: forced) to leave, you are breathing a sigh of relief while you hope things turn out okay.But a new analysis carried out by Nature and the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University says two-thirds of the world’s 211 nuclear power plants have more people in the same radius than the ones who have had to flee their homes in Japan. They're not all on known earthquake faults, obviously, but disaster concerns are an important public policy issue in times of disaster.read more