What a Swiss nuclear disaster could do to Europe

If there was a serious accident at one of Switzerland’s nuclear reactors, many of the radiation victims would be residents of other countries. A Swiss-led study has calculated the potential effect of nuclear meltdowns on the health of people living nearby. Its focus is on how meteorology and geography would influence the movement of a radioactive cloud. For example, this clip illustrates how the weather conditions on January 19, 2017 would have shaped the aftermath of an accident at the Gösgen reactor between Bern and Zurich. The study was led by Frédéric-Paul Piguet at Institut Biosphère, an interdisciplinary research institute in Geneva. Piguet and his team examined the accident risk at Switzerland’s five nuclear power plants, which fall between Fukushima and Chernobyl in terms of size. This includes 50-year-old Beznau I in northern Switzerland, the oldest nuclear reactor in the world. The research team used the weather conditions throughout 2017 to calculate the fallout ...