Potential nuclear power plant sites selection using multicriteria decision analysis

Abstract

Strategic decision-making is very difficult, particularly when multicriteria are involved. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method is an important approach that is applied to many complex decisions-makings. MCDA has been combined with Geographical Information System (GIS) to tackle spatial decision-making problems. One of the hardest spatial decision-making problems is the Nuclear Power Plant sites selection (NPP siting). This study has developed hybrid GIS and MCDA models to conduct NPP siting. Saudi Arabia was chosen to be the case study for this research. The identification of NPP siting area was divided into two phases. Phase I was a survey of all potential suitable areas for siting NPPs in the country. Phase II was a suggestion and ranking of the preferable suitable NPPs sites. The spatial analysis software ArcGIS 10.6 was utilized throughout this study. Thirteen significant criteria were applied to screen out unsuitable areas for siting NPPs. The results of phase I revealed that a scarcity of water in Saudi Arabia was the major reason to discard 96% of the possible sites. Furthermore, the overlaying process of all these criteria could dispose of nearly 98% of the contiguous Saudi lands. The remaining 2% land area was discerned to be suitable for positioning NPPs, which covered an area of 21473 km2 and 13395 km2 on the western and eastern coast, respectively. Meanwhile, the survey revealed that sea-level rise sensitivity must be considered on the eastern coast for the safe operation of NPPs. Further analyses disclosed that a sea-level rise of 2 meters could reduce the possible land areas by 20% and 13% in the eastern and western coastal areas correspondingly. The net feasible areas were inversely proportional to the aggregation of suitable lands into specific NPP footprint. It was concluded that the proposed assembly strategy could reduce the net effective area on the western coast for siting NPPs such as SMR350 (small reactor), AP1000 (moderate reactor) and EPR1600 (large reactor) by almost 22%, 37%, and 47%, respectively. The results of phase II (identification and ranking process) revealed that there are many locations available for siting NPPs in Saudi Arabia. Since the first-option areas, whose suitability scored 9/10, would be more than enough for proposing reasonable number of NPP sites on both coastal areas, the other options of ranked areas 2, 3, 4 and 5 (whose suitability were 8, 7, 6 and 5 respectively) were ignored for this time. There were 20 proposed NPP sites; 11 of which were on the western, and the other 9 on the eastern coast. Both coasts were sensitive for change of the criteria’s weights, particularly the eastern coast that expressed significant response.