Environmental Impact Analysis Process Environmental Consequences To The Study Regions And Operating Base Vicinities PDF Download

Deployment of the M-X system in sparsely populated areas of the southwestern United States will produce rapid, large-scale changes in the character of the human environment of these deployment regions. Effective operation of the M-X system requires a deployment region containing relatively few human inhabitants. Yet construction and operation of the system will result in the introduction of large numbers of people into the rural, thinly-settled deployment region. This rapid growth in population resulting from the large labor and materials demands of the project will cause significant changes in the economic and social structures of the rural deployment areas. In some cases, M-X deployment would transform deployment-region communities from slow-growing or declining communities of a few thousand population or smaller into active regional population centers of 20,000 persons or more. This would be the case for the communities adjacent to the M-X operating bases. Other areas would undergo a decade of 'boom-bust' construction growth similar to that caused by energy developments throughout the western United States. The economic, social, and local government impacts of M-X deployment have been estimated quantitatively using a series of inter-related models and computational algorithms. The direct economic effects on the regions are estimated from a given set of M-X project characteristics such as direct employment and material requirements. The indirect economic effects on the M-X are estimated using country-level interindustry-type models and the best available baseline projections for the localities studied. (Author).