Integrated life cycle assessment and environmental impact analysis: application to power plants

With the recent environmental challenges, especially with those concerning energy generation, it is essential to provide an integrated life cycle assessment (LCA) approach that considers environmental impacts of power plants. This work proposes a practical framework to conduct LCA on power plants, which considers the environmental life cycle impact assessment method (LIME). Activity models are defined for the LCA process and integrated LCA-LIME object model is defined and used to evaluate different environmental loads caused by power plants. Life cycle data from Japanese power plants are used to illustrate the proposed integrated framework. (c) 2007 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.