A semiquantitative assessment has been implemented for impacts of various kinds of the power industry on environmental components. and parameters (i.e. affected area, geologic environment, geomorphologic environment, atmospheric air, soils, wildlife, water consumption, surface water, ground water, radiation background, thermal, noise, and electromagnetic pollution, vibration impact, specific mortality, cultural environment, visual quality, social and economic impacts). A comparison has been made for types of the power industry as whole since in case of individual power stations significant variations may be possible due to differences in the technology employed, fuel quality, labor discipline and so on. The implementation of this comparative assessment is complicated by the following factors: 1) difficulty in taking into account indirect impacts on natural components through considerable material consumption (certain types of nontraditional power industry, being fairly pure in the view of ecology in the operational stage, need for their construction a large body of materials whose production is, ecologically, severely detrimental; 2) different rate of occurrence for various kinds of the power industry and, consequently, different total value of environmental damage (because of this we attempted to assess damage per unit of power generated). The assessment performed made it possible to identify top items for impacts on individual natural components as follows: affected area (hydro, wind and wave power industry); geologic environment (hydro- and atomic power industry); geomorphologic environment (hydropower industry); atmosphere (bio- and thermal power industry); vegetation (biopower industry); fauna (hydro- and tide power industry); irreversible water withdrawal (atomic and thermal power industry); surface water (hydropower industry); ground water (hydropower industry); radiation background (thermal, geothermal and atomic power industry); thermal pollution (thermal and atomic power industry); noise pollution (wind power industry); electromagnetic pollution (no top items); vibration impacts (wind and geothermal power industry); specific mortality (thermal power industry); cultural environment (hydro- and thermal power industry); visual quality (all types of traditional and wind power industry); social and economic impacts (hydropower industry). The ranking performed for the size of environmental damage per unit of generated electric power showed the following: thermal power industry - 74, hydropower industry - 7 1, atomic power industry - 68, geothermal power industry - 61, wind power industry - 47, biopower industry - 44, solar power industry - 43, tidal power industry 42, wave power industry - 31 scores. Thus, environmentally thermal power industry should be accepted as the most adverse industry while wave power industry as the least detrimental one.
