Group decision-making framework for site selection of coastal nuclear power plants in a linguistic environment: a sustainability perspective

ABSTRACT

Site selection of nuclear power plants (NPPs) is a critical task since it has a significant influence on individual safety, environmental protection, and regional development. The objective of this study is to develop a multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) framework in a linguistic environment that allows the government or the developer to select the optimal site for a costal NPP. This framework is composed of three primary parts: establishment of ranking criteria from a perspective of sustainability, determination of criteria weights using an entropy weight model, and aggregation of decision information by two compromise programing methods to compare and rank preferred candidate sites for NPPs. Finally, a case study in Fujian province, China is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the framework. The results show that there are significant differences between the weight values of criteria by level. The proposed approach is effective for selection of the most appropriate coastal NPP in consideration of sustainability under linguistic environments since the selected site is consistent with the feasibility report of NPP selection from the government. The findings provide a theoretical reference for NPP site selection involving multiple criteria and a small scale of decision makers and are also beneficial for sustainable nuclear power development and future energy structure optimization.

KEYWORDS:

• Linguistic environment
• multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM)
• nuclear power plant (NPP)
• site selection
• sustainability

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant [number 2018YFC1509008] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [number 71722004, number 72002152, and number 72001032].