What are the advantages and disadvantages of building a nuclear reactor in an urban area?

Isles of the Blessed

there is no particular advantage in co-locating a generating station in proximity to its demand. historically, such stations are located with convenience to the source of energy. ie coal plants located in Wyoming, hydroplants at Niagra Falls, wind farms on windy hills, tide generators on the coast, etc. A nuclear generator serves such a large region, that wires will have to travel distances no matter where the plant is located. High Voltage transmission is quite efficient. The major consumers merely need to be close to a substation or transformer vault. On a lighter note, people have this annoying habit of wanting to live near large scale industry that was built originally to be in rural location. ie the DIA airport was moved out many miles from Denver to preclude the security problems inherent with the old Stapleton field. And now, where are the new housing subdivision being built? How many people moved into the 3 Mile community after construction started on the first reactor? Industry is easy to regulate, people are not.



Fredericktown

Other than the power... I don't see any advantages of having it in an urban area.



St. Peter

Disadvantages: radioactive waste, target for terrorism or military attacks, possibility of accidents like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.



Pearl

disadvantages-radiation could be a problem to citizensanother disaster could happen like the Chernobyl where the fission reaction wasn't controlled properly and it blew up...leaving the surrounding area radio active. Advantages-it is accessible so that there are labourers available to work



Medford

The advantage is that it requires less effort for the workers to travel to the site of the reactor and that the electrical wires connecting the power to the users may be shorter. The disadvantages are due to the greater risk of a failure causing a spread of nuclear materials over a populated region rather than in a more open place. Such a reactor may require a cooling supply of water which is easier to provide if it doesn't have to be shared with the population. However the heat can be used for homes in winter so there are advantages too.



Aniwa

One major advantage would be having the plant close to the load it serves, the city. That mean less transmission lines to build and less loss from power transmission. You also could have access to city services, like potable water, fire department, etc. Now for the disadvantages, which, to my mind, heavily outweigh the advantages. Emergency planning would be an extreme challenge, since you have to arrange evacuation routes for the entire surrounding community. In the US, an entire nuclear unit was built and then shut down without generating even 1 megawatt of electricity because the surrounding localities would not cooperate with the emergency plan (see Shoreham on Long Island). Getting a source of cooling water is an issue, especially if the city is competing for a scarce supply. And in building it, there are massive amounts of steel, concrete and large pieces of equipment that have to travel to the site, which may be difficult traveling through a built-up area. The radiation is not really an issue because regulations prohibit emitting more than a small fraction of the radiation that would impairment anyone who lived handy the furthest plant limit concerning an unreduced year.



Lakewood Village

This question needs some additional context. What might be the advantages or disadvantages of building any kind of power generation system (coal - or natural-gas fired boilers, wind turbines, hydroelectric plants, etc.) in an urban area. All power generation has environmental impacts, and some of the impacts are a little surprising. For example, more uranium is released from burning coal than is released from nuclear power reactors. Even more necessaby is the add up to apprised of transcript dioxide and other gases increased by the amount in on solid waste generated. The alternative part of the question is "what is the claim re electricity?" Engineering and economic evaluation of advantages and disadvantaged of variant methods for power crystallization can betray explored broach the tome "Sustainable Energy" by Tester, Drake, Driscoll, Golay, and Peters. The point of my answer is to rich enough a amend context as to the query consequence that a guileless, direct answer to the ask on one's high horse won't fail misconstrued into the final answer Formal anent a complex topic.