Pollution and Radiation

Pollution and Radiation is an optional feature and is only available when Pollution is enabled in game settings.

General

Pollution and radiation are the two types of "environmental contamination" in Workers & Resources. Both Pollution and Radiation affect the health of your workers, and both can linger in the affected area. Radiation lingers for much longer than pollution and has much more drastic health effects on your population. The severity of the effects of pollution and radiation are dependent on your game difficulty, with the health effects becoming drastically greater with the overall difficulty.

Pollution

Pollution is generated from almost all industrial buildings in Workers & Resources. Pollution seems to blow towards the top right of the map, or the NATO - NATO border. Pollution has relatively minor health effects on most difficulties, but on hard mode the average building health for residential buildings within a polluted area can drop significantly and quickly. Pollution can be viewed using a pollution monitoring station and hovering over the "View actual pollution" button. Green is areas of no pollution, orange is areas of moderate pollution, and dark red is areas of high pollution.

Research can mitigate the effects of pollution: the Vitamins research at the Medical University, and the Pollution Filters research chain at the Technical University.

Radiation

Radiation is a harder contaminant to get, as it requires a built-up nuclear industry to become a problem. Radiation only comes from two sources: nuclear power plant fires and nuclear waste. Radiation has major health effects even on easier difficulties, dropping the average building health to ~60% from only low to mild radiation. Once spread, radiation takes a very long time to decay/disappear. If there is an area of high radiation, that area will take two in-game years (or about 12 real-life hours of continuous unpaused gameplay), or more depending on the size of the affected area, to fully decay away. Radiation can be viewed using the Pollution Monitoring Station also, but instead of the "View actual pollution" button, put click the "Dozimeter" button next to it, hover the dosimeter tool over any spot you want to check for radiation. If residential buildings are within an irradiated area, residents will soon get sick, and begin to fill up hospitals. Currently it does not appear that working in irradiated areas causes any health effects.

There is no way to prevent either a nuclear power plant fire or the effects of storing nuclear waste, except for mitigating the problem beforehand, i.e., building nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage areas away from your city.