Get the latest tech news

Wildfire Threat to Texas Nuclear Weapons Facility Highlights Intersecting Risks

Our new map shows where nuclear weapons facilities overlap with areas with a history of wildfires.

Last week’s narrowly-missed collision between a climate-related event and nuclear weapons—two of the planet’s greatest existential threats—highlights the dangerous games humanity is playing with each and serves as a potent reminder of why action to reduce the risks associated with each is so critical. To find out how big a deal it is to have a facility like Pantex threatened by a wildfire, I posed a few questions to two of my colleagues in UCS’s Global Security Program: Chanese Forté and Dylan Spaulding. In the unlikely case that a nuclear facility does burndown, we can theorize that airborne plutonium would likely settle on the nearby grazing land in the heavily agricultural Texas panhandle, where it can harm livestock and the local economy.

Get the Android app