An exclusion zone is a territorial division established for various, case-specific purposes.
Per the United States Department of Defense, an exclusion zone is a territory where an authority prohibits specific activities in a specific geographic area (see military exclusion zone). [1] These temporary or permanent zones are created for control of populations for safety, crowd control, or military purposes, or as a border zone.
Large-scale geographic exclusion zones have been established after major disasters in which radioactive particles were released into the environment:
Two exclusion zones (5 nautical miles (9.3 km; 5.8 mi) and 7 nautical miles (13 km; 8.1 mi)) were established temporarily in the Baltic Sea following the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. Dangers to navigation included loss of buoyancy inside the gas plumes and accidental ignition of the gas.
Border zones are areas where movement, property ownership or other activity is prohibited or restricted by legislation. Unlike regular territory, border zones are under administrative control of the border authorities. Entrance is generally only with an individual permit. Entering a border zone without authorization is a crime or misdemeanor and grounds for arrest. Border zones are instituted to pinpoint illegal intruders, conceal and obscure and prevent interference with border security procedures and equipment, and thus aid border guards with their work. For example, Russia maintains sizable border zones.
Similarly, exclusion zones have been established due to natural disasters. There is an exclusion zone on the island of Montserrat, where the long-dormant Soufrière Hills volcano started erupting in 1995 and has continued erupting since. It encompasses the south part of the island, accounting for over half of its land mass and most areas of the island which were populated before the volcano erupted. The volcano destroyed the island's urban center and capital Plymouth, as well as many other villages and neighborhoods. The zone is now strictly enforced; entry into most of the destroyed areas is prohibited, while some areas are subject to restrictions during volcanic activity or open only as a "daytime entry zone".
Before the launch of a missile or launch vehicle, the area surrounding the launch site and underneath the trajectory of the rocket, called the launch corridor, is cleared. That way, spectators, aviators, seamen and ground controllers are safe from a rocket launch, in particular when the rocket goes errant. Because the flight termination system destroys the rocket in that case, launches are scrubbed or postponed when someone or something enters the launch corridor to prevent damage or harm created by the falling remains of the rocket.
Exclusion zones are commonly used in the construction industry worldwide. For this purpose they are defined locations to prohibit the entry of personnel into danger areas, established through the risk assessment process for a construction activity. Typically, exclusion zones are set up and maintained around plant and below work at height.
With regard to protesting, an exclusion zone is an area that protesters are legally prohibited from protesting in.
Exclusion zones often exist around seats of government and abortion clinics. As a result of protests by the Westboro Baptist Church at the funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq War, 29 states and the US Congress created exclusion zones around soldiers' funerals. [2] In 2005, the Parliament of the United Kingdom created a one kilometre exclusion zone around itself. [3]
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The existence of exclusion zones is based on court rulings that allow the government to regulate the time, place, and manner of protests.
An exclusion zone is related to a free speech zone. Protesters are required to picket in a free speech zone, thus rendering the area around the free speech zone to be an exclusion zone.
When a restraining order is issued, an exclusion zone is an area that the respondent is prohibited from entering—often an area surrounding the petitioner's home or workplace. For example, if a Wisconsin harassment restraining order or domestic abuse restraining order is violated, the court may order GPS monitoring of the respondent. [4] [5] If the exclusion zone is breached, the GPS technology notifies law enforcement and the petitioner. [6]
Chernobyl or Chornobyl is a partially abandoned city in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, situated in the Vyshhorod Raion of northern Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. Chernobyl is about 90 kilometres (60 mi) north of Kyiv, and 160 kilometres (100 mi) southwest of the Belarusian city of Gomel. Before its evacuation, the city had about 14,000 residents. While living anywhere within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is technically illegal today, authorities tolerate those who choose to live within some of the less irradiated areas, and around 1,000 people live in Chernobyl today.
Plymouth is a ghost town and the de jure capital of the island of Montserrat, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom located in the Leeward Island chain of the Lesser Antilles, West Indies. It is the only ghost town that is the capital of a modern political territory.
The Pripyat or Prypiat is a river in Eastern Europe. The river, which is approximately 761 km (473 mi) long, flows east through Ukraine, Belarus, and Ukraine again, draining into the Dnieper.
Pripyat, also known as Prypiat, is an abandoned city in northern Ukraine, located near the border with Belarus. Named after the nearby river, Pripyat, it was founded on 4 February 1970 as the ninth atomgrad to serve the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which is located in the adjacent ghost city of Chernobyl. Pripyat was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 and had grown to a population of 49,360 by the time it was evacuated on the afternoon of 27 April 1986, one day after the Chernobyl disaster.
Iitate is a village located in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. As of 1 February 2020, the village had an actual population of 1,408, and a population density of 6.1 persons per km2. The registered population per village government records was 5,946 registered residents in 1807 households as of September 30, 2017. The total area the village is 230.13 square kilometres (88.85 sq mi).
The Soufrière Hills are an active, complex stratovolcano with many lava domes forming its summit on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. After a long period of dormancy, the Soufrière Hills volcano became active in 1995 and has continued to erupt ever since. Its eruptions have rendered more than half of Montserrat uninhabitable, destroying the capital city, Plymouth, and causing widespread evacuations: about two-thirds of the population have left the island. Chances Peak in the Soufrière Hills was the highest summit on Montserrat until the mid-1990s, but it has since been eclipsed by various rising and falling volcanic domes during the recent volcanic activity.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is an officially designated exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster. It is also commonly known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the 30-Kilometre Zone, or The Zone.
The Chernobyl disaster began on 26 April 1986 with the explosion of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR, close to the border with the Byelorussian SSR, in the Soviet Union. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven—the maximum severity—on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. The initial emergency response and subsequent mitigation efforts involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US$68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation. It is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history.
The Chernobyl disaster is the world's worst nuclear accident to date.
Slavutych is a city and municipality in northern Ukraine, purpose-built for the evacuated personnel of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant after the 1986 disaster that occurred near the city of Pripyat. Geographically located within Chernihiv Raion, Chernihiv Oblast, Slavutych is administratively subordinated to the Kyiv Oblast and is part of Vyshhorod Raion. It is coterminous with Slavutych urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. In 2021 the city had a population of 24,464.
Poliske or Polesskoye is an abandoned settlement and former urban-type settlement in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, part of Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. It is located on the Uzh River and was an administrative center of Poliske Raion (district). However, later the town was taken out of a registry as it was completely depopulated being located in the Zone of alienation. Currently around 20 people live there, so called samosely ("self-settlers").
Nuclear power has various environmental impacts, both positive and negative, including the construction and operation of the plant, the nuclear fuel cycle, and the effects of nuclear accidents. Nuclear power plants do not burn fossil fuels and so do not directly emit carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide emitted during mining, enrichment, fabrication and transport of fuel is small when compared with the carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuels of similar energy yield, however, these plants still produce other environmentally damaging wastes. Nuclear energy and renewable energy have reduced environmental costs by decreasing CO2 emissions resulting from energy consumption.
In the 1970s, an anti-nuclear movement in France, consisting of citizens' groups and political action committees, emerged. Between 1975 and 1977, some 175,000 people protested against nuclear power in ten demonstrations.
In late October 2010, Mount Merapi in border of Central Java and Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia began an increasingly violent series of eruptions that continued into November. Seismic activity around the volcano increased from mid-September onwards, culminating in repeated outbursts of lava and volcanic ash. Large eruption columns formed, causing numerous pyroclastic flows down the heavily populated slopes of the volcano. The 2010 eruption of Merapi was the volcano's largest since 1872.
Madsen v. Women's Health Center, Inc., 512 U.S. 753 (1994), is a United States Supreme Court case where Petitioners challenged the constitutionality of an injunction entered by a Florida state court which prohibits antiabortion protesters from demonstrating in certain places, and in various ways outside of a health clinic that performs abortions.
A Domestic Abuse Restraining Order (DARO) is a form of restraining order or order of protection used under the domestic abuse laws of the state of Wisconsin, USA, and enforceable throughout the US under invocation of the Full Faith and Credit Clause in the Violence Against Women Act. It is a legal intervention in which one person who is deemed to be hurting, threatening or stalking another person is ordered to stop — and often cease all direct and indirect contact — with the goal of reducing risk of further threat or harm to the petitioner. The petitioner and respondent will generally be in certain specific relationships such as a spousal or sexual relationship. If the petitioner is in an unwanted stalking relationship with the respondent, however, a closely related form of injunction, a Harassment Restraining Order (HRO) may be more appropriate.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a first-person-shooter survival horror video game franchise developed by Ukrainian game developer GSC Game World. The series is set in an alternate version of the present-day Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, where, according to the series' backstory, a mysterious second Chernobyl disaster took place in 2006. As a result, the physical, chemical, and biological processes in the area were altered, spawning numerous nature-defying anomalies, artifacts, and mutants. The player takes the role of a "stalker" - a name given to trespassers and adventurers who have come to explore the exclusion zone and its strange phenomena.
The Polesie State Radioecological Reserve is a radioecological nature reserve in the Polesie region of Belarus, which was created to enclose the territory of Belarus most affected by radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. The reserve adjoins the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. The environmental monitoring and countermeasure agency, Bellesrad, oversees the agriculture and forestry in the area.
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was captured on 24 February, the first day of the invasion, by the Russian Armed Forces, who entered Ukrainian territory from neighbouring Belarus and seized the entire area of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant by the end of that day. On 7 March, it was reported that around 300 people were trapped and had been unable to leave the power plant since its capture. On 31 March, it was reported that most of the Russian troops occupying the area had withdrawn, as the Russian military abandoned the Kyiv offensive to focus on operations in Eastern Ukraine.