A Matter of Survival...

As with any energy source, renewable or non-renewable, comes with various advantages and disadvantages.

Nuclear reactors are complex devices that require many levels of safety built around them.

A keystone of any plant's preplanned protective action strategy involves emergency planning zones (EPZs) around the plant. The EPZ's size and shape vary for each plant due to detailed consideration of the specific site conditions, unique geographical features of the area, and demographic information. EPZ-specific strategies provide a strong starting point for implementing additional measures beyond the planning zone, if extremely unlikely events unfold.

• Emergency Planning Zones are defined => Action Plans for different zones will be stablished (State/Local)
• In case of power plant accident => protective actions will be performed

When Emergency Planning Zones are defined, in the unlikely event of a nuclear power plant accident, everyone can follow directions from State or local officials to make sure protective actions are implemented safely and effectively for the affected population.

You live in Belgium, next to either one of the nuclear power plants of Tihange or Doel when you suddenly hear a huge explosion. It seems to be coming from the outskirts of town. The air is glowing and you don’t know what happened. Well, we tell you what happened – both nuclear plants exploded at the same time and your life is about to turn upside down.

To have a map that allowed us to perceive the idea of which area would be affected by the hypothetical scenario, we followed the following steps:

1. First, we used Google Earth to look for the Tihange and Doel nuclear power plants’ location, tagged them and exported them as a kml file.

2. In order to analyse which countries and areas would be affected by the explosions we downloaded the shapefiles regarding the borders with the information on the correspondent websites:  https://ec.europa.eu/  and  https://geodata.lib.utexas.edu/ .

3. After we transfer that data on ArcGIS Pro, we proceeded to create areas within a range, each one of them corresponding to different levels of damage caused by the explosions. For that, we used the buffer tool to create circles representing each level of impact. The nuclear power plants were their center.

4. Being this done, we then used the clip tool to get the rings.

5. We intersected the boundaries of the administrative levels with each level of danger (using intersection tool).

6. After making intersections for all levels in each country, we used the union tool and then dissolved the boundaries (using dissolve boundaries tool) to make everything more homogeneous and noticeable.

Throughout these processes we faced some challenges, such as not knowing which level of administrative division was equivalent in each country and thus having to find a solution on how we would account the number of people affected.

One aspect we found strange was the fact that at the Tihange Nuclear Power Plant, its surrounding area with a radius of 0 km to 1 km was left out of the danger zone.

The area encompassed by 1 km radius from the nuclear plants would be completely devastated. No humans would survive. We expect losses between 2000 and 4000 people.

From 1 km to 6 km radius, blast waves would produce a massive force on the walls of all two-story buildings, causing them to collapse with the impact. Among the dead and injured we estimate 700,000 people to be involved.

If the explosion didn’t kill you, chances are the radiation would. From now on it will be a slow burn.

Up to 8 km radius, people would be affected by third degree burns.

Up to 11 km radius, first-degree burns can occur.

In these two ranges we found it more difficult to make a prediction of how many people would suffer from first and third degree burns, once the covered cities are not entirely affected. We would be giving a estimate with a large margin of error.

More than 500,000 people would experience flash blindness on a clear day (up to 21 km radius).

Up to 85 km radius people would be temporarily blinded on a clear night. Between all the countries implicated, we calculate approximately 7 million people.

• All forms of plants close to the power plants would be annihilated.
• The meltdowns would need to be contained as much as possible. If they aren’t handled properly, radiation poisoning and contamination could spread through soil and water.
• People would be at risk of radiation sickness and cancer rates would increase. Acute radiation syndrome or radiation sickness is caused by receiving a high dose of radiation.
• Within minutes, your body can absorb enough radiation to kill you.

In order to estimate how many people would actually be affected, we found it helpful to cross information of the attribute table of each country and create our own Excel tables, allowing us to draw a graphic as the one represented below. All information regarding population data was extracted from  https://www.worldometers.info/ .

Naturally, Belgium would suffer the most consequences, followed by the Netherlands and Luxembourg. We estimate around 11 million people being affected in Belgium, 6 million in the Netherlands and 200,000 in Luxembourg. Germany and France would be the least affected by the catastrophe, however we estimate 2 to 5 million people to be affected in these countries.

With a simple calculus we also predicted that 0.4% of the world's population would be targeted by the explosions.

Besides all direct damages that may occur from these explosions, there are two very important aspects that not always come to mind when speaking about disasters of this scale: socio-economic and psychological impacts.

Several organizations such as WHO (World Health Organization), UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) confirm this fact.

Populations which have been exposed and evacuated from previous disasters such as in Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi showed high rates in alcoholism, depression, anxiety, bullying and suicides.

In a more optimistic point of view, there is some good to come out of this. Vegetation would start to envelop the cities affected by the explosions and once these small plants start to decay, small amounts of soil will build up. Eventually, the environment will become habitable for larger plants and trees.

The chances of these two nuclear power plants exploding at the same time are very small. Nuclear reactors aren’t designed to explode, unlike atom bombs. They both use nuclear fission, but reactors use it to generate electricity whilst atom bombs to generate energy powerful enough to cause an explosion. In addition, reactors are controlled and monitored. 

Nuclear power causes less pollution than fossil fuels, however, it isn’t the safest form of energy regarding the effects of nuclear meltdowns.

A catastrophe like this is very unlikely to happen, but it is always a good idea to think of these hypothetical scenarios in order to develop a better method of generating energy. Many renewable sources of energy are being used all over the world and who knows many more are to come.

We saw what could happen if two nuclear power plants exploded at the same time in Belgium. Imagine what could happen if all the 443 nuclear reactors in operation all over the world exploded at the same time. Very limited chances but not impossible. That would be another story.