The Future Role of the Nuclear Energy in Brazil in a Transition Energy Scenario

Abstract

This paper discusses and presents figures about the future power consumption in the world and, especially in Brazil, based on the current world and Brazilian’s energy scenarios. Emphasis is given to the scenarios of nuclear power and uranium resources demand. A discussion on the future roles of thorium and uranium fuels in the replacement of the traditional resources like oil and gas is also presented, as it is the role of the new nuclear power plants, planned to be built in a short term time horizon. This paper considers two different indexes for future projections, and the results obtained indicated a strong dependence on them. The time horizon for the analysis was fixed on the time estimated for Brazil to reach its maximum in population, and parameters evaluated were taken from the Brazilian’s governmental and world data on the population growth, energy consumption and energy consumption per capita. Calculations show that the power consumption projections for Brazil, for the adopted time horizon and working with global indexes, become overestimated, when compared with the results considering the national indexes. According to our approach, power consumption estimates using global indexes becomes approximately 4.5 times higher than the estimates presented by the Brazilian indexes. This was the motivation to the discussion between the Brazilian and world energy demand scenarios, and also the roles of nuclear energy in the future transition from the current conventional to alternative sources.