Answer to Map #87
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Answer: This week’s map was a proportional symbol map depicting the world’s most productive nuclear power plants.
The big red dot on this map indicates Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, which is the world’s only nuclear power plant with a net capacity over 7,000 MWes. The two orange dots are for the only two power plants whose net capacities exceed 6,000 MWes, which are the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station on the shore of Lake Huron in Ontario and the Kori Nuclear Power Plant outside Busan, South Korea. Each successively smaller dot reflects a decrease in capacity of 1,000 MWes. You can find a handy list of the world’s active nuclear power stations here.
Currently, the world gets about 11% of its electricity from nuclear power. Only a few countries have invested heavily in nuclear energy. The United States has 100 nuclear reactors, followed by France (58), Japan (43), China (36), Russia (36), and South Korea (25). Of all the world’s countries, France is the one that derives the highest percentage of its electricity—a remarkable 72.3%—from nuclear energy. By contrast, in the U.S., only about 19.7% of electricity comes from nuclear fission.
While nuclear energy is generally clean and efficient, there are also some substantial risks associated with it. Our hints this week mentioned one dot that is not on our map: the dot for the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. That plant was one of two constructed in that part of Japan (the other was not badly damaged and appears on our map). In March 2011, the area around the plant was hit by a major earthquake, which triggered a large tsunami. These events badly damaged some of the plant’s reactors, causing a leak of radiation into the area. Japan’s government was forced to evacuate people who lived near the plant while workers risked their lives to get the facility under control. Eventually, a decision was made to decommission the plant entirely.
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is not the only dot that is conspicuously absent from this map. You also won’t find dots corresponding to the locations of several other major nuclear disasters, including the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in what is now Ukraine. In 1986, the Chernobyl plant malfunctioned during a safety test, causing a huge steam explosion followed by a fire. Thirty-one people lost their lives directly as a result of the Chernobyl disaster; it is difficult to count how many people may have suffered indirectly as a result of cancer. The entire city of Pripyat had to be evacuated, and the “Exclusion Zone” surrounding Chernobyl remains one of the most radioactive places on earth.
Yet these disasters have not deterred some proponents of nuclear power. In fact, there are 12 nuclear power plants currently under construction, mostly in the developing world. In the future, we may have to add dots in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Belarus, China, India, Pakistan, Slovakia, Japan, and Bangladesh to this map.
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