With all the hype and news surrounding the recent earthquake in Japan and the subsequent damage that has resulted to the country’s nuclear power facilities there’s much renewed interest in the topic of nuclear power. People are concerned about their safety and concerned for the environment – and for good reason. For those of you interested in seeing exactly how close you are to a nuclear facility Esri has an interesting web service that can provide you with the answer.
Using the “How close am I” service, the Esri powered app takes a user-specified location (like your city name), runs a proximity analysis, and and returns an interesting map that describes exactly how far away you are from facilities of interest. Users also have the ability to customize the map by adding additional layers of information, like earthquake fault lines, evacuation zones, and tectonic boundaries. Optionally, the user can also select from several basemap data layers including simple streetmap, OSM, Satellite imagery, and topographic. Once finished, the user has access to copy/paste a direct link to the map (see this link for an example) or can also grab the embed code (see embeded map below) or share on Twitter of facebook. Click HERE To try the service for yourself