At a local level, the social impacts of the nuclear industry result, on one hand, from the significant economic benefits the industry brings (such as direct and indirect employment, and the building of high value skills) and, on the other hand, from environmental consequences, which are difficult to weigh (such as effects on human health, time required to confine radioac­tive waste, accident risks, etc.). All these elements are addressed in a very detailed way in the NEA report Risks and Benefits of Nuclear Energy (NEA, 2007, pp. 56-73). As the report stresses, there is no consensus on the social impacts of nuclear power, and any indicators considered are partly intuitive and partly resulting from discussion between stakeholders.

In terms of local employment, both direct and indirect employment need to be considered: direct employment during construction (5-10 years), operation (about 60 years) and dismantling (several decades), and indirect employment resulting from local development, notably commercial and education infrastructures, and from the supply chain if it is localized in the country. There are no global statistics regarding local employment resulting from the nuclear industry, and figures can vary greatly from one country to another depending on existing national and local skills, and on the govern­ment’s and the operator’s human resources policy.

To consider the French case, the civil nuclear sector employs about 150,000 people, including about 26,000 EDF (Electricite de France) employ­ees, about 20,000 employees from other companies who work on the main­tenance of the 58 plants, and about 55,000 employees of other big companies (Areva, CEA, Andra). To these can be added about 50,000 employees of subcontractors, including those involved in construction, dismantling or maintenance of the plants, and more generally those working for service providers. All branches of engineering are involved, at different levels, including technicians, engineers, researchers, etc. To take the example of EDF’s Flamanville site (with two PWR plants in operation — Flamanville 1 and 2 — and one 1600 MWe EPR under construction — Flamanville 3), in 2009, there were 850 permanent jobs (650 EDF, 200 subcontractors), 1800 people working during the plant outages for scheduled maintenance and refuelling, about 40 trainees, and about 100 indirect jobs (trade, catering, security etc.). Construction of Flamanville 3 is scheduled to take place between 2007 and 2014, with 3300 employees on site (40% of whom are local staff, while 60% have been moved in). After 2014, there will be 300 EDF employees on site, 150 subcontractors, and about 900 people for main­tenance work during scheduled outages.

The operator has concluded agreements with local communities and local employment organizations, in order to facilitate the gathering of informa­tion on local companies, inform employment players of job offers and bids, orientate international and national companies to local employment, and increase local employees’ training. There is also a plan to help with retrain­ing after the building process is completed. Indeed, the operators’ strong involvement in local development, especially in employment, is the main lever of their public acceptance. This is one of the reasons why it is easier to rebuild a new nuclear plant on an existing nuclear site than it is to find a new site: the nuclear industry is viewed by neighbouring populations as a real asset for local development.

With regard to environmental impacts at the local level, impacts on human health during normal operation of a plant have to be considered, together with the potential effects of major accidents and the time required for radioactive waste confinement.

Several studies have made a comparison between different energy sources regarding the health impacts of normal operation and have shown that nuclear power, along with renewable energies, has the lowest health impact. See, for example, the mortality associated with normal operation of German energy chains in 2000 (Hirschberg et al, 2004). It appears to be clear that nuclear, wind and hydro have the lowest mortality, natural gas and solar photovoltaics are higher, and oil and coal have the highest rate of ‘years of life lost’.

The standards for emission of liquid or gaseous effluents include very significant safety margins, so that the human health impacts of a nuclear plant in normal operation are lower than the radioactive emissions found in granite regions, or experienced during a long flight. The standards of authorized emissions have been defined at the international level by UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation). These standards are applied in national regulations. There is a strict control of radioactive emissions from different points of a plant and in its vicinity, and in most countries such data are published by safety authorities and available to the public. Some controversies remain about the low-dose impact of radioactivity on health, which raise epistemological difficulties: how can we prove that there is ‘no effect’? All we can do is show that no link has so far been observed between normal emissions and mor­bidity. Outside normal operation, there have been controversies about the emissions from the Chernobyl accident, and it will take time to assess the emissions from the Fukushima accident and their impacts on the environ­ment. (It needs to be underlined here that the Fukushima accident was a consequence of the combination of an earthquake and a tsunami, and, at the time of writing, there have been no deaths due to radiation in Fukushima. However, the Fukushima accident will of course lead to a global assessment of safety requirements and emergency planning and organization. The Three Mile Island (TMI) accident in 1979, which was a technically severe accident, entailed no health impact on the population.)

Many studies have already been implemented and will yet be imple­mented to estimate the impact of the Chernobyl accident on human health. It is impossible to make a precise estimation because ‘radiation-induced cancers are not all distinguishable from those due to other causes’. And, moreover, other pathologies may also have been caused by radiation. A study published in 2005 by the Chernobyl Forum (an international expert group gathering together several UN agencies including IAEA and UNSCEAR, the World Bank group, Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation) distinguishes three populations exposed to different levels of radiation: ‘emergency and recovery operation workers who worked at the Chernobyl power plant and in the exclusion zone after the accident, inhabit­ants evacuated from contaminated areas, and inhabitants of contaminated areas who were not evacuated.’ It concludes that ‘the highest doses were received by emergency workers and on-site personnel, in total about 1000 people, during the first days of the accident, ranging from 2 to 20 Gy, which was fatal for some of the workers. Effective doses to the persons evacuated from the Chernobyl accident area in the spring and summer 1986 were estimated to be of the order of 33 mSv on average, with the highest dose of the order of several hundred mSv’. It estimates that ‘among the 600,000 persons receiving more significant exposures, the possible increase in cancer mortality due to radiation exposure might be up to a few per cent’. Significant increases of thyroid cancers have been diagnosed among those who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident. This report concludes also that the socio-economic effects of Chernobyl in the contaminated areas should also be as soundly analysed as the health effects. There is no doubt that these are even more difficult to quantify than the health effects.

The social impact of waste confinement, at the local scale, is also a very controversial topic. The ‘Not In My Back Yard’ (NIMBY) syndrome applies more to waste storage or waste disposal than to nuclear plants, for several reasons. It is difficult to link these facilities to employment, as they do not produce any goods, and employment benefits are limited. Moreover, as will be shown below, a lot of people think that there are no satisfactory solutions for storing High Level Long Life (HLLL) waste, so they fear that a waste disposal plant could entail health consequences for neighbouring inhabit­ants, and could have a negative impact on the region’s image and on local products. Added to this, the time-scale involved with HLLL waste manage­ment — millions of years — seems beyond our human comprehension. For philosophical reasons it is very difficult to build confidence about waste management near disposal sites. People think that being given economic compensation is an attempt to buy their acceptance. It seems that strong operator and stakeholder involvement, from the beginning of a project of waste storage or disposal, can ensure better public acceptance of the shared burdens and benefits of steady-priced and cheap electricity. Some interest­ing experiments in this regard are being implemented in Bure, in north­eastern France, in the area surrounding a geological disposal research laboratory. There, all the radioactive waste producers have been involved in developing local employment opportunities by transferring renewable energy technologies to the area, in parallel with the R&D work being carried out on radioactive waste management. This helps to illustrate the share of responsibility between different regions in French energy policy: the regions which accept radioactive waste disposal benefit from technology transfers to develop also renewable energy sources.

Whatever the technical options considered, it would seem absolutely necessary for newcomer countries to think of a waste management policy right from the moment of the first opportunity study made when launching a nuclear programme, since the waste management question will be raised by their opponents anyway, and then taken up by public opinion at large. It is important to answer public concerns regarding intergenerational responsibility, which is one of the main issues of sustainable development. The goal of such a policy is to avoid passing on unsolvable problems to future generations. Today, several satisfying and secure options exist for managing different categories of radioactive waste (see Chapter 14), includ­ing HLLL waste, using geological disposal. The ‘problem’ of waste manage­ment is no longer a technical one but rather a psychological and political issue for local populations.

To conclude this section focused on the ‘social impacts’ of a nuclear pro­gramme, it appears that such impacts are still misunderstood, partly because of an ignorance of scientific matters, partly because of the ‘original sin’ of nuclear power, and partly because there is no link between statistics con­cerning risk and intuition, or gut feeling. A better knowledge of the techni­cal and economic facts and figures of nuclear power versus other power sources is a necessary (though not always sufficient) condition to obtain better public acceptance.