An empirical investigation of nuclear energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission in India: Bridging IPAT and EKC hypotheses

The transition toward clean energy is an issue of great importance with growing debate in climate change mitigation. The complex nature of nuclear energy-CO2 emissions nexus makes it difficult to predict whether or not nuclear acts as a clean energy source. Hence, we examined the relationship between nuclear energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the context of the IPAT and Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) framework. Dynamic Auto-regressive Distributive Lag (DARDL), a newly modified econometric tool, is employed for estimation of long- and short-run dynamics by using yearly data spanning from 1971 to 2018. The empirical findings of the study revealed an instantaneous increase in nuclear energy reduces environmental pollution, which highlights that more nuclear energy power in the Indian energy system would be beneficial for climate change mitigation. The results further demonstrate that the overarching effect of population density in the IPAT equation stimulates carbon emissions. Finally, nuclear energy and population density contribute to form the EKC curve. To achieving a cleaner environment, results point out governmental policies toward the transition of nuclear energy that favours environmental sustainability.