NukeCast
If it happened today, where would the fallout go
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I built NukeCast because I’ve always wanted a tool that answers one question fast. If it happened today, where would the fallout plumes go and where would you drive to get out of it. NukeCast uses weather forecasts to drive a Lagrangian particle dispersion model with wet and dry deposition. Scenarios are defined by selecting strike site(s) and yield(s); the setup uses preselected US sites and yields based on FEMA emergency data. Outputs are shown as estimated ground level radiation dose at the surface over a 12 hour integration. Free to use with limits, and a paid tier if you want more runs/features because AWS compute time ain’t cheap.
HN · launched Jan 26, 2026 · 18 upvotes (top 36%) · 1 view
Niche: environmental and geospatial analytics software · 124 launches, 14 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 124 launches in environmental and geospatial analytics software →
Could you build this?
No Implementing an accurate, real-time Lagrangian particle dispersion model with atmospheric physics and meteorological wet/dry deposition requires deep domain expertise in atmospheric dispersion science.
What it would actually take: A real version requires an atmospheric transport and dispersion engine (similar to NOAA's HYSPLIT or FLEXPART) integrated with high-resolution numerical weather prediction data (e.g., NOAA GFS/HRRR gridded GRIB2 datasets). The backend pipeline must ingest 3D wind, precipitation, and temperature fields, simulate millions of particles undergoing advection, turbulent diffusion, and radioactive decay/deposition, and convert results into geospatial raster/vector plumes. Building this requires specialized expertise in computational meteorology, numerical methods, and high-performance geospatial computing.
Discussion
6 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Concerns raised: Alaska and Hawaii not included, San Antonio target location appears inaccurate, Effects modeled as perfectly spherical without accounting for topography or buildings, $10/month pricing for niche market, Limited to US cities in free plan
Feature requests: Include non-US cities in free plan, Model effects accounting for local topography and buildings
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 60 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #25 of 61 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 84 days after the earliest competitor.
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