Page 260 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

250 G. A. da Silva et al.

magnitude—economic scale—favorable land relief and high capacity factor with a
usage up to 75 %.

4.2 Itaipu Power Plant Description

Located on the Parana River, the seventh most voluminous river in the world, on
the border between Brazil and Paraguay, the Itaipu Power Plant was planned
during the 1960s, when these countries experienced fast economic growth, which
demanded great amounts of electricity to the region. An international agreement
was signed in 1966, and after a long period of planning and local condition
evaluation, in 1974 a company named Itaipu Binacional was established, in order
to manage the construction and operation of the power plant (Itaipu Binacional
1994). The civil works to construct the dam were started in 1975 and finished
during 1986. However, the first turbine began to operate some years earlier, in
1984. Some civil works continued till 2004, when the two last turbines were
installed—raising the system’s capacity to 14.0 GW (Itaipu Binacional 2009).
Itaipu Power Plant takes advantage of the large flow of Parana River and of the
2
local topography, which creates a lake of 1,350 km of area, and volume of more than
2
3
29 km resulting in a coefficient of 9.33 MW/km —higher than any other Brazilian
2
2
hydropower plants of its class: Tucurui (1.75 MW/km ), Furnas (0.90 MW/km ),
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2
Sobradinho (0.25 MW/km ), or Balbina (0.11 MW/km ) (Itaipu Binacional 2009).
Dam’s construction demanded important civil works as: excavation of the
deviation channel (with dimensions of 2 km length, 150 m width, and 90 m depth
through basalt rock); earthen and gravel dams (7.7 km of length, and 225 m of
average height); and construction of concrete installations (main dam, spillway,
power house, etc). To manage all those civil works, two construction sites were
installed, on both sides of the river. Both units had centers for silage, gravel
production, ice production, woodworks and ironworks, for concrete reinforcing,
and concrete mixing and transport, among other services. The development also
led to the establishment of a city of over 9,000 houses, lodgings, schools, clubs,
markets and stores, services of entertainment, and hospitals, where more than
30,000 civil workers lived along 10 years (Itaipu Binacional 1994). All of these
processes and capital goods were considered on the study, as part of the LCI.
Detailed description of these structures and information about their environmental
burdens can be obtained on the original study (Ribeiro 2003).

4.3 Research Development and Method

After a literature review on hydropower LCA, LCI of Itaipu power plant was
developed. The project was carried out along three years and produced a master
degree dissertation (Ribeiro 2003). Due to the limited human and financial