@Ooops - I have never done aquaponics but I have looked in to it some. My concern is the food you use to feed the tank, it has to be clean.

Absolutely, you would have to check the source, of course.... starting your own farm you could make your own, or use fish that eat plants rather than pellets, and grow your own. I wanted to start one using lobster too!

Wow.
At one time I considered relocating to southeast Washington!

East?
Golly.
Had you seen this?


I heard a rumor Ted Turner has bought major tracts of land in Patagonia...
Probably pretty safe from the rads there.
Good luck
rc

Haha! Yes, I have seen that, and that very map is why I was looking at NW Washington, even Idaho, Montana, etc...

But after looking at the actual readings, plus what we know is coming over, I picked Maine. Still not thrilled, but the lesser of the evils and all. NM, WA and Fukushima? Yeah... I am going East.

Has anyone considered that the nations nuclear reactors were built on land not already contaminated from nuclear testing? That might explain the lack of nuclear reactors as pictured.

Of course population has lots to do with it too.

Aquaponics is a great idea and can be done anywhere - no need for expensive farmland or a large area; your source for water will be municipal so it will be as clean as that (not great, but maybe not bad either); I'm heavily into this subject and found the best source besides the videos on line was 'Friendly Aquaponics' out of Hawaii; they offer a course for around a grand but say right on the website that if you read all their archived newsletters, you'll learn everything they have over the years; they're very honest in describing the mistakes they've made and what they've learned.

A small AP unit can feed your immediate family, a slightly larger one can feed the neighbors and be a source for bartering, and there's many people that have started up commercial operations that can be a good income for about 40 hours a week labor, most of that spent in delivering product. The actual AP takes very little time on a daily basis once its established.

If you're not into growing a protein source and just want to concentrate on the veggies, or you're in a wide-swinging temperature climate area, I would recommend for the fish end of things just getting simple goldfish (available at any pet shop as 'feed' goldfish for predator fish, usually a few cents a piece) or koi, both of which grow rapidly, are extremely tolerant of water temp and pH changes, and will eat darn near anything; growing tilapia or other food fish is a bit more difficult but certainly not impossible. Plan on sourcing the fish food locally (vermiculture combined with composting is ideal, with the addition of easily raised duckweed and algae in a separate sun-exposed tank to feed them) rather than buying commercial fish food which is really ground up junk fish, potentially highly contaminated.

This is also a great family project and would make a great learning tool for schools to adopt (as well as a money maker). I would love to see jr high school students all taught that they can grow their own food this way, making a whole new generation of farmers in sustainable food practices rather than the 1000 mile salad we consider normal now.

Just saw the nuclear reactor map; they were built where the population demands were high enough, obviously. Oregon doesn't have one and I'm presuming our electricity here is all sourced from hydro.

I would personally worry about being anywhere near Yellowstone since that's seeming to be waking up and from the looks of that map, anything east of Iowa is scary indeed; but maybe that's just me. I long ago got tired of living in heavily populated areas.

Although I'm pretty happy on my right-next-to-BLM-land area in southern Oregon, the lack of sunlight half the year is getting to me. Mexico is next on the possible moving list, once Social Security kicks in, if the US govt manages to remain anywhere near solvent in that amount of time. If they default on SS, all bets are off; the old people will well and truly revolt at that point.

Great point. Most of those areas have been highly populated for a long time.... Denver for instance. But no plant... and they have obviously never been opposed to nuclear.