be relocating with some of the workers, further adding to the population (by a factor of about three) of the surrounding area. These population increases affect the amounts of services (e.g., water, sewer, food, housing, schools, health care, police, fire protection) required, again adding to the population, although creating permanent jobs for the area in some instances. If the site is fairly distant from a large population center, these impacts can be severe for the affected locality. On a normalized basis, SPS would require the smallest work force, about 500 persons per year per 1000 MW. All others would be in the range of 700-1000 persons per year per 1000 MW. However, because of the large size (5000 MW) of the SPS, its impact would be much greater when compared to any other single plant of typical size. If plants were located in power parks of comparable size (with regard to capacity) then these differences would decrease, assuming all the plants at a single location were built simultaneously. Another option for any technology is to extend the time period over which construction takes place. This strategy would lessen the peak level of an impact. 4.7 INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES 4.7.1 Introduction The relative institutional impacts of energy technologies are becoming increasingly important in the assessment of policy priorities for federal research, development, and demonstration expenditures. The environmental impact statement process created by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) has been interpreted in many legal opinions to require the consideration of factors beyond air and water pollution. Institutional impacts fall within this spirit, even if they are not covered by the letter of the law. There is a practical, as well as legal, basis for institutional analysis of new energy technologies. A recent publication of a nuclear industry trade organization, the Atomic Industrial Forum,17$ alleges that government regulation accounted for an increase in nuclear power plant engineering man-hours of nearly 40% in the 1970s alone. Thus, a comparative assessment of the contribution of the Satellite Power System (SPS) to the nation's energy resources should include a discussion of the effects of energy technology deployment on existing and potential regulatory institutions and the effects of these institutions on the deployment of energy technologies. This section will compare the regulatory issues surrounding electricity systems based on the SPS, coal, light water or breeder reactors, and centralized terrestrial photovoltaics. The comparison is based on the assumption that decision makers who must choose between energy technologies are interested primarily in the significant differences between those technologies, not in a complete catalogue of all of their characteristics. In the case of institutional analysis, this means that the most relevant information is that which highlights the different responses of regulatory institutions to different energy technologies and projects the impact of these institutions on deployment.
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