International symposium on environmental geotechnology and global sustainable development, 5

Abstract

Electricity generation and transportation are two of the leading sources of environmental impact around the worl. For developing countries, the problem is exacerbated by a lack of funding, which inevitably prevents industry leaders from choosing the economically best available technologies considering the total cost picture. For a full cost assessment, the external damages and costs must be first quantifified and then integrated into the decision making process. Externalities include lifetime (construction, operational, and decommissioning) plant costs, and environmental (human and ecological) risk for local, regional and global scales, and social (demographic and lifestyle) changes.In most cases,estimating the externalities is the greatest challenge to planning and policy decisions, in part due to the current limits ub working knowledge, and the large amounts of data needed to carry out the analysis.Since the early 1990s, several high level studies on external costs of energy have established a methodological framework to quantify both healt and environmental impacts from electricity generation, and to quantify in monetary terms the damage resulting from these physical impacts. In order to incorporate economic, social and environmental aspects in the decision process of energy planning in Brazil, a joint research project sponsored by International Atomic Energy Agency has been carried out, the primary objective of which is to perform a comparative risk assessment of alternative energy systems. This project includes not only the quantifications of the physical impacts and damage costs associated with airborne emissions from the traditional fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) and nuclear energy, but alsothose from renewable resources, mos specifically from hydroelectric, which is the major dource for electricity generation in Brazil. The main objective of this paper is to present the main challenges in estimating damage costs from the point of view of energy planning in Brazil.