General

The internet is a great thing. Many people and organizations put a lot of information on their websites, which only have to be combined. If done properly, it's interesting how much information can be retrieved within a very short time.

My goal was to identify a nuclear power plant in the United States of America on a satellite picture. First of all, I searched for a list of nuclear power plants in the US. That was easy: http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/united_states.html

The "International Nuclear Safety Center" is so kind to put up a good overview over the power plants in the US. I chose one of the power plants, namely the one in Oyster Creek, N.J., according to this page the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the US, and known by fishers as certain kinds of fishes are attracted by cooling system's warm water output. That reminds me of some studies that concluded that river Danube would have the right temperature for alligators and that type of animals should the Zwentendorf power plant start operating. But I digress.

After a few minutes of searching, I also found a topo map of exactly that area showing where the nuclear power plant (only called "power plant" in the map) is:


And from that on, it was all very easy. The coordinates are about -74.19621 longitude and 39.81927 latitude (the online interface where I retrieved the topo map from gave me those coordinates, it was linked by some fishing website, BTW), and retrieved a few more detailled images from Terraserver-USA:





Et voila, we have a nice overview over the area of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant. And when I'm able to do that within an hour, what keeps terrorists off from doing the same type of research?

A dissertation got censored because of similar type of information which "might help terrorists", and not even pilots get this kind of information even while they're forbidden to fly over nuclear power plants (and Oyster Creek is explicitly on that list, although I lost the link to it...).