Issue 2

This work focuses in transport of high level radioactive wastes, mainly consisting of spent fuels from
nuclear power utilities in Spain. To date, these wastes are being stored in the own generating facilities,
or they are sent to France; but these options are not any more technically or economically sustainable,
thus a central repository has been planned in the country -its final location just decided in
November 2011- so that we have chosen this site to advance in the studies.
The objectives are to describe the logistics of these transports and estimate their associated radiological
impacts: eight routes are considered, corresponding to the nuclear power installations in
Spain, plus the return of spent fuels which are also temporary stored in France; calculation of impacts
is based in the radiation index of transport, speed and distances, populations exposed, the
corresponding doses and average values of risk.
We have developed a computer application, which needs only to enter the radiation level at 1 m from
the transport and select the route; thus the radiological impacts are automatically obtained, concluding
that they are irrelevant in normal conditions of transports, while the program (web available) can
be useful for further analysis of such operations.

Cement production is an energy-intensive process. Utilisation of fossil fuels is common practice in
the cement industry around the world. Alternative fuel substitution rates increase every year. More
specifically, 18 % of the fuel used by the European cement industry in 2006 consists of alternative
fuels. This study aims to investigate the prospects for the partial replacement of conventional fossil
fuels currently used in the TITAN cement factory in Thessaloniki, Greece, with alternative fuels,
focusing on the impact of alternative fuel use on the emissions of air pollutants from co-incineration
operations. Air emissions were estimated for both the conventional fuel and mixtures of conventional
fuel with alternative fuels, based on emission factors found in the literature but also using the
measurements conducted by TITAN in 2010. Emission estimates indicate that legislative limit values
for all pollutants are not exceeded. Based on the emission estimates and measurements in the flue
gas, the dispersion of the plume around the factory has been described with an appropriate
numerical simulation model. Results suggest that the factory’s contribution to the air pollution levels
in the surrounding area is very low for most regulated pollutants.

Wind energy offers significant potential for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Most applications
have been developed onshore but the planning and siting conflicts with other land uses have created
considerable interest and motivated research to offshore wind energy establishments.
In this paper, a systematic methodology in order to investigate the most efficient areas of offshore
wind farms’ siting in Greece is performed, integrating multi-criteria decision making (MCDM)
methods and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools.
In the first level of analysis, all coastal areas that don’t fulfill a certain set of criteria (wind velocity,
protected areas, water depth) are identified with the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
and excluded from further analysis. The Analytical Hierarchy Process is performed in the evaluation
phase and pairwise comparisons provide the most appropriate sites to locate offshore wind farms.
Information concerning evaluation criteria (average wind velocity, distance to protected areas,
distance to ship routes, distance to the shore and distance of possible connection to the existing
electricity network) is retrieved through GIS, eliminating the subjectivity in judgments. The whole
methodology contributes to the portrait of the geographic analysis and stands as the last image of
the space characteristics suitable for offshore wind farms.