Nuclear Emergency Drill Conducted at Laguna Verde Plant in Veracruz; Evacuation Operation Underway

An integrated exercise of the External Radiological Emergency Plan (PERE) was conducted at the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant, located on the central coast of Veracruz. The drill involved a task force comprising municipal, state, federal, army, and navy personnel.

This exercise, mandated every two years by international norms for hypothetical emergency situations, assessed notification, mobilization, evacuation, medical attention, and protection protocols in real-time for communities within a 16-kilometer radius of the plant in Alto Lucero municipality. For twelve continuous hours, response centers, specialized hospitals, temporary shelters, and air, land, and sea transport units were activated to simulate evacuations in the event of a nuclear accident.

The operation was coordinated through the Committee for the Planning of External Radiological Emergencies, which includes federal and state institutions with specific functions. Laguna Verde, Mexico's sole nuclear power facility, is situated in Punta Limón, Alto Lucero, Veracruz, facing the Gulf of Mexico. It is surrounded by vegetation and near several riverside villages, with its two generating units capable of supplying electricity annually to Veracruz and Tlaxcala states, or approximately 6.8 million inhabitants.

Personnel from the Secretariat of National Defense, National Guard, Secretariat of the Navy, and the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, along with various federal and state agencies, participated in the drill. The Secretariat of the Navy emphasized that as a preventive exercise based on a simulated scenario, it did not correspond to a real emergency and posed no risk to the population. Recent records indicate Laguna Verde experienced 16 technical shutdowns between 2019 and 2024.