Site selection for nuclear power plants

Finding a site for any major industrial facility is always a highly complex operation, and nuclear power plants are no exception.

Choosing nuclear power to meet a country's electricity needs is a major national decision, not only in technical and technological terms, but also in economic, sociological and political terms. In particular, the implementation of the resulting equipment program interferes with national and regional policies on regional planning and environmental protection. It must therefore be approved by the public authorities and carried out in the broadest possible spirit of consultation with the communities and populations concerned. Seeking the best possible acceptance of the project thus appears to be the first criterion to satisfy, when undertaking a nuclear site selection process.

However, such an approach involves many other technical, economic and ecological parameters, which may or may not be specific to nuclear energy, and the sites finally selected cannot be perfect, but do represent the best possible compromise.

In practice, any ambitious nuclear site search and selection program is based on an iterative process, which allows us to sift through a large number of possible sites, and to select the best one(s) after an increasingly stringent selection process, based on increasingly detailed multi-criteria analyses.

At each stage of the process, the sites studied are confronted with an analysis grid, which brings into play a large number of evaluation criteria, generally falling into three complementary families:

• firstly, a set of technical and economic criteria common to all major industrial facilities, designed to ensure the overall feasibility of the project at an acceptable cost. These include considerations relating to the footprint required for the facilities, site access arrangements, connection to the various external networks, local geological conditions, the existence of a satisfactory cold source, etc. ... ;

• secondly, for the essential part of the assessment, a set of "safety" criteria, reflecting the requirements specific to nuclear facilities and generally deriving from legislative and regulatory provisions. These are fundamental parameters which guarantee that the sites selected will enable the plants to be built and operated in complete safety, preventing accidents and, where appropriate, limiting their consequences for the natural and human environment. Foremost among these criteria are the seismicity of the sites, the risks associated with their industrial environment, the distribution of neighboring populations and the guarantee of refrigeration conditions, although this list is by no means exhaustive;...