Elevation and coastal exposure

Name: Elevation and distance to the coast of operating nuclear plant sites
Creator: NuclearChain
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

18 operating plant sites sit within 3 km of the sea and 10 m of elevation, together 56 GW gross, 14% of the fleet by capacity. Elevation and coastal distance only; this is exposure, not a flood-risk assessment.

Elevation and distance to the sea are read from a 30 m terrain model against each site's own coordinate, not from a plant's flood design basis. A low, coastal reading says nothing about a plant's actual flood protection: seawalls, grade-raising and other post-Fukushima hardening at many of these sites are not represented here at all. Sites with only an approximate position are left out, since a terrain reading against the wrong point would be worse than none.

Lowest elevation, operating sites

Plant	Country	Elevation	To the sea	GW gross
Akademik Lomonosov nuclear power plant	Russia	0 m	on the coast	0.1
Barakah nuclear power plant	United Arab Emirates	2 m	on the coast	5.7
Shin-Kori nuclear power plant	South Korea	3 m	on the coast	2.1
Tarapur nuclear power plant	India	3 m	on the coast	1.2
Tianwan nuclear power plant	China	3 m	on the coast	6.6
Saeul nuclear power plant	South Korea	3 m	on the coast	3.0
Olkiluoto nuclear power plant	Finland	4 m	on the coast	3.6
Gravelines nuclear power plant	France	4 m	on the coast	5.7
Takahama nuclear power plant	Japan	4 m	on the coast	3.4
Salem nuclear power plant	United States	6 m	on the coast	2.5
Brunswick nuclear power plant	United States	6 m	3.5 km	2.0
Blayais nuclear power plant	France	7 m	on the coast	3.8
Haiyang nuclear power plant	China	8 m	on the coast	2.5
Hongyanhe nuclear power plant	China	9 m	on the coast	6.7
Zhangzhou nuclear power plant	China	9 m	on the coast	2.4
Angra nuclear power plant	Brazil	10 m	on the coast	2.0
Ringhals nuclear power plant	Sweden	10 m	on the coast	2.3
Doel nuclear power plant	Belgium	10 m	on the coast	1.1
Turkey Point nuclear power station	United States	10 m	on the coast	1.7
Hope Creek nuclear power plant	United States	11 m	on the coast	1.2
Seabrook nuclear power plant	United States	11 m	3.1 km	1.3
Madras nuclear power plant	India	11 m	on the coast	0.2
Shidao Bay nuclear power plant	China	11 m	on the coast	1.7
Ling'ao nuclear power plant	China	11 m	on the coast	4.2
Heysham nuclear power plant	United Kingdom	11 m	on the coast	2.6

Sources

Elevation and coastal distance: NuclearChain, from SRTM/ASTER GDEM terrain data and Natural Earth coastlines , public domain terrain data; see /about/ for method
Reactor and site data: Global Nuclear Power Tracker, Global Energy Monitor, August 2026 release , CC BY 4.0

How these sources are used, including the corrections applied on top of them and what is deliberately left blank · download the underlying data

Cite this page

NuclearChain. "Elevation and coastal exposure." https://nuclearchain.net/elevation/. Accessed 2026. Built on the Global Nuclear Power Tracker, Global Energy Monitor, CC BY 4.0.

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with that attribution. Download the data.