Following the incidents at nuclear power plants in Japan after the earthquake I was wondering which power stations around the world are near active earthquake zones.
With this in mind, I’ve created a map combining two sets of information:
- A heatmap of every 4.5+ magnitude earthquake since to 1973 – around 174,000 in total
- The location of 248 atomic energy plants, including numbers of reactors. Represented by blue markers.
The seismic data are from the United States Geological Survey and the nuclear power station information the International Atomic Energy Agency. The map is built from two Google Fusion tables, here and here.
To see the actual locations of the earthquakes you can toggle the heatmap off and display markers instead.
Map of global earthquake activity and nuclear power plant locations.
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How do you create a heat map – I want to do something similar
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Excellent Map – amazing how the ring of fire is so dominant where earthquake activity is recorded. A pacific centralised map like I saw in National Geographic’s store in Regent Street London would make it even more visually powerful!
Please republish with a longer history of earthquake data. For example, this map is missing the quake potential of the New Madrid fault zone.
So it’s good to see that the vast majority of the world’s nuclear power plants are nowhere near earthquake zones. Also that mag 4.5 quakes would not trouble a nuke plant – only when you get real biggies is there any problem. After all, Japan has had many many quakes, and it’s only this one that has caused any problem. And that was down the the tsunami as much as anything.
I wonder where the best place to be is, in the event of major earth changes. Given the fact that the US is covered with Fukushima fallout, it seems hard to pick anywhere safe. The upper ranges of Mongolia?
This is exactly what I have been looking for- thank you for this info. However, I think that the actual fault lines themselves should be marked on, because if there was not a small quake there recently does not mean a large quake could occur.