Sites and social assessment of nuclear power plants

The sites of nuclear power plants in Japan has the features, first the extreme expectation for regional development because of the selection of depopulated districts for most locations, and the second, apprehensions of local people for two reasons of nuclear power generating techniques which do not plant the roots in society and handling of radioactive materials. In order to cope with these problems, it is necessary to consider that the development plan of the regions around reactor sites must be compiled systematically. Its premise is the ''social assessment'' which estimates the economical and social influences and evaluates the merit and demerit of nuclear power plants prior to the construction. This is of course inevitable. The objects of the assessment may be divided as follows: the human effect to individuals, the institutional effect to local community, the economical effect to region, and the national influence to the whole country. While the developmental action of locations includes the stages of examination, planning, construction and operation, and three location patterns are recognized according to the emphasized function, the improvement of national economy, upgrading of environmental quality, and the most priority in local welfare. In the process of the assessment, the following items may be taken notice that each item requires sometimes the weighting; the pattern to abandon location may exist; positive and negative effects are required to be distributed evenly in a triangle having the apexes each representing one of the above three patterns. (Wakatsuki, Y.)