The Geography of Reactor Siting Policies in the U. K

The paper examines the population siting criteria used to locate nuclear power stations in the U.K. Four sets of criteria are identified. A systematic search for feasible sites is then performed using the 1971 census 1 km grid-square population data. The results indicate that there are far more feasible sites than hitherto believed and that they are by no means restricted to peripheral locations. This provides the basis for further research into the location of nuclear power stations. There have been few geographical studies of the location of nuclear reactors in the U.K., despite an early interest in the subject (Rawstron, 1955; Mountfield, 1961). Yet this topic is currently of immense national and international significance, if judged by either the scale of the proposed capital investments or the magnitude of the possible consequences of major reactor accidents. The lack of geographical interest seems to reflect the inherent technical complexity of this subject, the difficulty of obtaining information about siting decisions and siting policies from government or the Central Electricity Generating Board, and the absence of an immediate geographical contribution. Furthermore, the basic groundwork in the geography of energy is missing; for example, there appear to be no geographical studies of inter-regional energy flows for either gas or electricity supplies and very few studies of the spatial patterns of energy consumption. Nevertheless the locational aspects of reactor siting policies are susceptible to geographical analysis. The principal locational criteria used relate to both the population geography of the country and the regional patterns of electricity forecasts. Whilst it is currently difficult to study the latter, research on the purely population aspects of siting policies is practicable using readily available national census population data for 1971. Indeed the population-geographic aspects of siting decisions are important for two reasons. First, the number of people affected by low-level radiation releases during normal operations depends on the local population distribution around a reactor. Secondly, the number of potential casualties in the event of a major accidental release of radiation depends on the size and duration of the release, the prevailing wind direction, and the local and regional distribution of population. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that since the 1950s siting criteria have been developed which explicitly take into account the population distribution around reactor sites. Of course population geography is not the sole determinant of reactor sites. Factors such as suitable geological conditions, ample cooling water, the impact of large numbers of construction workers and heavy traffic flows, the ecological effects of warm waste water, and proximity to major demand centres are all important. However, it would appear that in the planning stage population considerations are a major determinant of where to carry out more detailed site investigations (Hunt, 1970; Northumberland County Council, 1979). Thus the identification of feasible sites in terms of purely population criteria may itself be of considerable importance as a Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N.S. 7: 150-62 (1982) Printed in Great Britain This content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Wed, 21 Sep 2016 05:19:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The geography of reactor siting 151 basis for subsequent studies of current and proposed sites. It would also indicate the extent to which the population geography of the U.K. acts as a major constraint on the location of nuclear power stations. Finally, it would provide a test of the hypothesis that nationally few suitable sites exist, a view currently held by the C.E.G.B. (Caufield, 1981). This topic is also very relevant to the current debate about nuclear power, particularly as it appears that neither government, nor the Central Electricity Generating Board, nor the Nuclear Installation Inspectorate, nor the National Radiological Protection Board has carried out systematic and comprehensive searches of the U.K. space to determine how many sites exist and where the 'safest' ones are located. The very limited studies that have so far been published are largely based on either inaccurate or unrepresentative population data (see Openshaw, 1980) for example, the Flowers Report (1976), Kelly et al. (1977). In many studies there appears to be a built-in bias in favour of the nuclear industry; see for example, Dunster and Clarke (1980). This situation has parallels in the U.S.A.; see Wolpert (1980). Generally, there is a lack of rigorous and soundly based geographical research. The cause of the data inaccuracies in many studies is the difficulty of obtaining population data for the spherical zoning systems used in site assessment studies. Typically, the zones consist of a series of distance bands out to a distance of 32 km or more from a site; each distance band is divided into 30-degree sectors. It was not until the mid-1970s that national small area census population data were available in a form suitable for automatic spatial data processing; see Rhind et al. (1977). Even then a search for all feasible sites would involve computer run times of several days' duration without the development of special geographical data processing techniques. This paper is concerned with the task of identifying all feasible reactor sites in the U.K., based purely on population criteria

Economic geography · Geography · Regional science · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Risk Perception and Management · Social Acceptance of Renewable Energy

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