The aim of emergency preparedness is to protect the affected people and their livelihoods, to care for the population affected over a limited period of time and provide them with bare necessities, and to limit the consequences of an event.
This objective requires that protective actions are planned and prepared for the population, animals and the environment, and implemented in the event of an incident. Detailed preparations in the emergency preparedness and hazard zones are necessary for the ordering and performance of immediate actions that are specified by each nuclear installation.
There are two emergency preparedness zones around each nuclear installation: one emergency preparedness zone 1 with a radius of three to five kilometres and an emergency preparedness zone 2 with a radius of about 20 kilometres. The two Beznau and Leibstadt NPP sites share the emergency preparedness zones 1 and 2. The Paul Scherrer Institute and Zwilag have a special hazard zone.
The zone plans are managed by ENSI as the minimum geodata model “Zone plans for emergency planning” (in German) (GeoIV identifier 178, download as ZIP file) and are also published on the ENSI web portal at https://nfo.ensi.ch/ (in German).
Further Information
- The maps are available on the geoportal of the federal government.
- Notfallschutzzonenkonzept mit Gefahrensektoren (in German)
News
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Radiation Protection Report 2024: All Legal Limits Met
In 2024, Swiss nuclear installations met all legal radiation protection limits according to ENSI’s annual radiation protection report. Based on a closely coordinated system of monitoring instruments, ENSI was able to verify that the regulated parties fulfilled their legal obligations to protect both personnel and the general public from radiation.
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MADUK: Display of measurement data improved
ENSI has upgraded its MADUK web application. The MADUK monitoring network is used to monitor the radioactivity around nuclear power plants and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI).
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Security and safety as parts of the overall culture for the protection of man and the environment
Alongside safety in its narrowest sense, safety culture also includes the security of nuclear installations together with other aspects that are important for ensuring nuclear safety. This is demonstrated by the revised second edition of the Oversight Report on the safety culture in nuclear installations of the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI).
Background articles
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Dispersion models
In the event of an unplanned release of radioactive substances into the atmosphere, protecting the population and the environment is of the highest priority. This requires early identification of the areas potentially affected by the radioactive substances. Before the onset of a release, however, it is not yet possible to rely on environmental radioactivity measurements.…
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Expertise for the worst case scenario
«In the event of a nuclear accident we would use our knowledge to protect the population. In the worst case scenario I would prepare computer-based forecasts on the spread of the radioactive cloud from my position in the protected room of the ENSI emergency organisation. In this way we could estimate the risk to the…