Socio-Economic Impacts of Locating a Nuclear Waste Repository in Sweden

This paper examines possible socio-economic effects of locating a nuclear waste repository in a rural region of Sweden. In particular, the aim is to analyse the local population and employment developments induced by the construction and operation of a storage facility. A socio-economic impact model has been constructed in order to amalgamate estimations of demand, linkages and production conditions within different sectors of trade and business as well as the public sector. The combined employment and trade-and-business projection is integrated with a demographic prognosis model. A result of the analysis is that the local employment and population impacts are considerable, but the effect is not sufficient to compensate for the long-term negative population and employment trends.