Assessing nuclear power’s role in sustainable development: an environmental STIRPAT modelling

Abstract The energy sector is shifting towards clean and sustainable energy solutions to combat climate change and achieve carbon neutrality goals. As the second largest energy source of low carbon emissions, nuclear power is presumed to accelerate the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. However, existing time-series and panel data studies on the relationship between nuclear energy, CO 2 emissions, and other economic factors yielded mixed results regarding nuclear power’s role in reducing CO 2 emissions. Result variations are often attributed to the choice of predictors, locality of technology use, and timeframe of the studies’ scope. The complex relationship between nuclear energy and CO 2 emissions renders it challenging to determine its true role as a clean energy source. Therefore, the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT) model, an extended IPAT framework, was developed via supervised machine learning to explore the statistical relationship between nuclear energy adoption and CO 2 emissions using data on 29 nuclear power-generating nations from the year 2019. The empirical findings show a statistically significant inelastic relationship between nuclear energy generation per unit of GDP and CO 2 emissions. Specifically, a 1% increase in nuclear power generation per unit of GDP results in a slower 0.4528% increase in CO 2 emissions, indicating that CO 2 emissions rise at a decelerated rate relative to nuclear energy expansion. This likely indicates improved reliance on cleaner energy to drive economic growth, realizing increased power generation output for less economic resources used, causing CO 2 emissions to rise at a slower rate compared to other high-carbon energy sources when investment is shifted towards more advanced technology. The results further reveal a negative inelastic relationship between the share of nuclear power in a nation’s energy mix and CO 2 emissions, with a coefficient of − 0.4252%. This suggests that expanding nuclear power’s share in a nation’s energy mix contributes to a gradual reduction in CO 2 emissions and offers a promising intervention strategy for mitigating the detrimental effects of climate change. Along with population growth and technological efficiency, the increased adoption of nuclear power in a nation’s energy mix should be a key policy development consideration towards environmental sustainability.