Management of Commercially Generated Radioactive Waste - U.S. ...

5.63
non-significant. Again, the Southwest site is subjected to relatively large impacts, pri-
marily because there is a scarcity of skilled available local labor.
The translation of forecasted project-related in-migration into socioeconomic impacts
is complex and imprecise. Estimates of the level of demand that will be placed on the com-
munity to provide social services to the new workers and their families were made by apply-
ing a set of factors (see DOE/ET-0029, Appendix C) to the project in-migration values. The
product indicates how many units of each social service would be "expected" by the
in-migrants. The severity of these impacts is primarily related to the capacity of the
site county to adsorb these expected values. To contain all of the spent fuel in a
10,000 GWe-yr scenario, eight reference repositories in salt, three in granite or basalt,
or six in shale were estimated to be required; thus, the impacts described would occur 8,
3, or 6 times (but in different places) depending on the medium chosen for disposal. In a
similar way the impacts for construction of fuel reprocessing waste repositories would occur
6, 7 or 10 times depending on media chosen for disposal. (See Chapter 7 for numbers of
repositories required in different power growth scenarios.)
The calculated level of the expected need for additional social services at the three
reference sites is given for the year 2000 for spent fuel and fuel reprocessing repositories
in Tables 5.4.18 through 5.4.21. Identification of social services that would likely be
required indicates the potential extent of socioeconomic impacts. The ability of communi-
ties to provide services identified here, with or without financial assistance, is highly
site-specific and is beyond the scope of this document. Some of the social services listed
can be described as operational, such as physicians and teachers. These needs are more
easily met on a temporary, less-costly basis than are those services that require major
capital investment. The latter include hospital beds to the extent that hospital space is
also needed, classroom space, and additional sanitary waste treatment capacity. Capital
investment needs are forecast to be large, especially in the Southwest site, and to the
extent that they persist over time, they will represent a serious challenge to community
planners and local government. The increase in the local crime rate is only one indicator
of the social disruption and a sense of a decline in social well-being experienced by com-
munity residents faced with large-scale development. This analysis does not address one
site-specific but very important impact of any major construction activity; that is the
impact of increased property values, increased taxes and increased commodity prices on
fixed-income families.
In general, the reference Southwest site is more likely to sustain significant socio-
economic impacts compared with the other two sites, because it has a smaller available
unemployed construction labor force, lacks a nearby metropolitan center, and is subject to
the generation of greater secondary employment growth compared with the other sites. If a
repository were to be built in an area where demographic conditions approximated that of
the Southwest site, a detailed analysis of site-specific socioeconomic impacts would be
needed to help prevent serious disruptions in provision of necessary social services.