Introduction
As the demand for energy grows significantly year by year, and in order to reduce the dependence on fossil fuel, governments had started to build more and more nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, as the nuclear power plants bring us cheap and clean power, we are also put under the growing risk of the side effect: The danger of the leak of nuclear waste. According to the International Nuclear Event Scale, the two most severe accidents are the Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The two cases ring an alarm to all the governments on the importance of polishing human management and preventing natural disasters, respectively. Recapping the two most severe nuclear disasters, the human factor is hard to say, meanwhile the natural factor, in the case of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which is the earthquake and accompanied tsunami, might be better prevented through scientific methods. Here I combined the locations of all the nuclear power plants on earth along with the locations of serious earthquake happened within one map. By that, we can vividly examine the places where has a high risk of suffering from the nuclear waste leaking incident.
Inspiration
Recently, the Japanese government announced its decision to discharge the nuclear waste, more specifically, the radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. The incident had raised a huge amount of discussion all over the world. By looking over the news, I got inspired by various heatmaps and videos visualizing the damage of the dumping waste water across the Pacific Ocean. I realize that dynamic visualizations can be a helpful tool in illustrating events across time.
Materials
Both the dataset of the nuclear power plants and the earthquake are downloaded from Kaggle.
The instrument used for visualization is Carto, which is a web-based platform capable of visualizing and analyzing different spatial data.
Process
I decided to create two maps from these two datasets, one displays all the places of the nuclear power plants worldwide and the other one shows only the places in a high risk of the nuclear waste leaking incident. Therefore, after achieving the datasets, I imported them into Carto, and realized the date column cannot be read by Carto. So, I went back to the csv file to reformat the date column into type date, and cleared the time for 3 cells. Then, I imported the datasets again into Carto, and reformat the data type into date. For all maps, I decided to use a dark theme as the base map to create a serious tone.
For the first map which contains all the nuclear power plants, I marked the places where there is a severe earthquake happened and colored the points according to their magnitude. The lighter of the color of the point is, the larger the magnitude of the earthquake. Next, I made the locations of the earthquake into animated aggregation based on date happened, highlighting it from the points aggregation of the nuclear plants. Even though I had tried using points aggregation for earthquakes as well, I decided it is not necessary to display all, rather than creating a sense of spreading. I also added a widget indicating the year of the earthquake appearing for the animated points.
For the second map, I continued with the design I set for the earthquake dataset, reversed the color, and further added an analysis on the nuclear power plants dataset layer. I created a distance buffer with the range of 50 miles, the distance the Nuclear Regulatory Commission suggested for people to take action for food and water protection, around all the nuclear power plants. If there is an earthquake happened within the distance of 50 miles to a nuclear power plant, the nuclear power station should have experience impacts just like other architectures, such as bridges or buildings. The intersect and aggregation analysis filter out all the earthquakes that are out of the range of the distance buffer. The remaining points of the earthquakes are only the ones within the 50 miles distance of a nuclear power plant, remaining the same color representation of the first map.
Result
Through the Map we can see most of the Asian and European countries that have at least one nuclear power plants. Among all countries, Japan clearly has a higher risk of the waste leaking under the condition of the earthquake. Besides Japan, places like North part of Taiwan and the West Coast of the US are also under a risk of nuclear waste leaking caused by earthquake. The nuclear power plants here should make some extra approaches to ensure the safety of the nuclear power plants. Also, when we build more nuclear power plants, we should try to avoid the places where earth quake occurs a lot.
Reflection
Carto is a very convenient tool for visualizing geo-related data across the map. By doing this project, I have developed most the carto’s functionalities. It also enlightened me in more ways to present geo-related data. Visualizing the correlation between the natural disaster, earthquake, and the nuclear power plants, can help make the risk of nuclear power plants more transparent. Thus, the general public could have a chance to ponder about the related issues, too. Within the government, such ideas can also be used to prevent building power plants at places where earthquakes frequently take place, or add on protections to existing power plants which frequently experience earthquakes. There is little thing that we can do as the general public, but hopefully the project can shed some light on government taking effort to prevent such disasters like, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
https://www.sutori.com/story/the-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-disaster–kH1shydLs9wakzLdfvSXLD3A
http://www.xinhuanet.com/talking/2021-04/15/c_1211112282.htm