At the site, type in any street address and get a customized map that shoes how close that address is to a nuclear waste route within one, three, and five miles. Also shown are the nearest nuclear waste sources, schools and hospitals.
Search URLwire archives since 1994

The routes analyzed were taken directly from the U.S. Dept. of Energy”s final Environmental Impact Statement for the Yucca Mountain. nuclear waste dump. DOE analyzed two scenarios in order to “bracket” the range of the number of shipments required to deliver nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain from locations nationwide. 

The lower bound shipment estimate is derived from the “primarily train” scenario; the upper bound is associated with the “primarily truck” scenario. Some combination of the two, the DOE says, will be used for Yucca Mountain. EWG research and information technology staff painstakingly identified the routes selected by DOE by comparing the published maps in the EIS to the high-resolution rail and highway maps displayed on our GIS system. 

Altogether, they traced 20,000 separate route segments to replicate the DOE’s published maps. They then used the GIS system to draw bands along those segments identifying distances within 1 mile, 2 miles and 5 miles of the route.  With the routes in our GIS system, they were able to pre-measure the distance between route segments and the physical location (latitude and longitude) of each of the nation’s 29 million, nine-digit zip codes (Zip+4s, in USPS parlance). 

When you type in an address on the MapScience site, our server looks up the Zip+4 for that address and the associated latitude and longitude, and locates its proximity to the nearest nuclear waste route segment on a custom map displayed on your computer. At the same time, it identifies schools and hospitals in the vicinity from separate “data layers” and displays them, too.

To learn more or to check out your address, visit http://www.mapscience.org/
 
 
 
 

.

Editors at the below sites as well as hundreds of others are subscribers to URLwire. Sites announced via URLwire are featured regularly at these and other online news and reviews outlets: