Real-Time Radiation Maps

Yesterday a fire broke out at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Russian occupied southern Ukraine. On hearing the news of the fire I almost immediately rushed to the Real-Time Radiation World Map in search of any detected spikes in radiation in the area.

The Real-Time Radiation World Map visualizes radioactivity levels from Geiger counters around the world. Luckily, as you can see from the screenshot above, there don't seem to be any high levels of radioactivity showing up on the map anywhere in this region of eastern Europe. Unfortunately the map does not currently have many Geiger counters in Russia or any that are particularly near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant does feature on the European Commission's Radioactivity Environmental Monitoring map. The map shows the current gamma radiation readings from automatic surveillance systems in 39 countries. Thankfully the graph of the gamma dose rate at the Zaporizhzhia plant currently shows a very low level of gamma radiation, a level well within the range of natural background radiation.

Russia is reporting today that the fire at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been completely extinguished.

While on the subject of nuclear power plants I also recently stumbled upon the Nuclear Stations Map, which is a new interactive map of all the nuclear plants in the world, both decommissioned, in operation or in construction.

On the map the power plant markers are scaled by their capacity and the colors indicate their status (green = in operation, black = decommissioned and orange = in construction. On viewing the Nuclear Stations Map I was struck by two things. One (as you can see in the screenshot of the map) is the clear abandonment of nuclear power in Germany (the last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shut down last year). The other is that a little over a decade after the disaster of Fukishima, Japan appears to be building at least three new nuclear power plants on its coastline.