The Impact on Human Health and the Environment of Different Types of German and Polish Power Plants: A First Scoring Approach in Germany

Abstract

This paper gives a short overview about the types of power stations in Germany and Poland. The energy production in Germany in 2012 was 629,7 TWh. Every type of power plant poses a risk to humans and the environment but in a different way and to a different extent. A discrete mathematical method, named Hasse diagram technique is applied. The software package used is the PyHasse software. A first ranking approach is presented taking the 8 most used types of power plants in Germany into account and ranking those applying 5 different evaluation criteria, including 3 environmental health attributes. In this first approach not only nuclear power stations but also coal-driven power stations come worst in this ranking method. Renewable energies come best in our approach. Unfortunately their percentage of the overall energy production is still too low (about 22,1 % in Germany and 10,4 % in Poland). This underlines the necessity for urgently supporting the development of renewable energy power plants. Furthermore, we plan to extend our scoring approach to other European countries, starting with the neighboring country Poland.