What is the safety of surrounding areas where Atomic Power Station will be built

Question

What is the safety of surrounding areas where Atomic Power Station will be built

Answer 1

"Will be" makes me think pretty safe.  Chernobyl is a design not likely to be repeated, and they keep getting safer.  

In fact, some commercial stations make *significant* contributions to local property tax revenue, which in the typical deep-country location, makes lots of tax revenue per person (nice schools, low taxes on everything)  

Answer 2

No significant difference to places that don't have one (many studies have been done which quite consistently don't find any excess of cancers around nuclear power plants).

Considering that nuclear power has gone for more than two decades without a serious accident with off-site consequences and that Chernobyl was the first to actually harm a member of the public (although even that is disputable given that we don't know what low levels of radiation do) the chance of someone in the surrounding area being harmed by the reactor are pretty close to zero.

Those living downstream from a hydroelectric dam, near a coal power plant or next to a wind turbine (which have been known to shed blades at times) are at much greater risk than those living near a reactor.

Answer 3

We can say with some confidence that coal fired electricity does have some major health problems for surrounding areas. There are different health risks with nuclear plants. The life cycle for nuclear plants has been in progress for long enough to say that whatever risks we have they have not been as bad as coal.

But if we attempt to get more years out of old facilities, we will be walking into uncharted territories. Recall that Chernobyl did not fail early in its life, but after it had run a long time. It went ballistic when a fail safe system was being tested and failed.

We do not have complete confidence that it would ever have worked, but we know that more things fail in the first year and late in the expected life of a system. So the need for care follows the risk curve, high early, high late, but moderate in middle years.

Facilities for refining, concentrating the fuel may actually pose greater risk to the surrounding area and to personnel. But of course those facilities will be handling the fuel for many reactors. Escaping dust from processing fuel may be our biggest risk.

Answer 4

It depends on the country.  US plants are not the same as Japanese plants or Russian plants or French plants.  Different designs, different safety records, etc.

Answer 5

Traditionally nuke plants have been sited in rural areas. The largest cluster of them in the states in in the northeast where the plants are usually found in bucolic settings and along rivers.

How safe this is is debatable, when you consider that cows eat grass, which leads to fallout in milk when things go wrong, as they have on numerous occasions.

Nuke plants don't explode, but the fallout is a problem when there are accidents. It does not lead to sudden death, but rather to quite easy to identify regions where cancers and childhood leukemia clusters.

Answer 6

The only one that I know about is in Diablo Canyon, in CA.

There are not residences around it, and I have to wonder why the call it Diablo Canyon.