The lecturer is Dr. Yoshio Matsuki. Before coming to Ukraine in 2000, he worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1994 till 2000 to manage an international research project about the health and environmental impacts of nuclear and other different electricity generation systems.
The methodology was developed by the research institutes in the EU and the US, and was widely disseminated by the EU to its member-states, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the other regions of the world. The methodology considers the types and the amounts of the pollutants emitted from the power plants, the population distribution around the plants, and weather conditions, then it calculates the incremental concentrations of the pollutions on the ground of the environment. Then, health impacts such as deaths and illnesses both for a short period and for a long period are calculated, on each type of illness that is to be caused by each type of pollution. To calculate these health impacts, the analysts need to select suitable coefficients out of many literatures, on some of which are still under discussion because this field of science is new, and its history is less than twenty years. Then on the next step, the health impacts are to be evaluated in monetary values. To attach monetary values to each health or environmental impact, the analysts need to select a unit value, using many different approaches such as assuming a hypothetical market value for willingness to pay to prolong one year of one's own life and/or the costs needed for medical services.
Mr. Matsuki tested this methodology in Ukrainian cases, while he was acting as a course advisor for the graduate school students of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy's Department of Ecology from 2006 to 2008, for their Master's projects.
