Environmental footprint impacts of nuclear energy consumption: The role of environmental technology and globalization in ten largest ecological footprint countries

This study investigates the environmental footprint impacts of nuclear energy consumption in the presence of environmental technology and globalization of the ten largest ecological footprint countries from 1990 up to 2017. By considering a set of methods that can help solve the issue of cross-sectional dependence, we employ the Lagrange multiplier bootstrap cointegration method, Driscoll-Kraay stan-dard errors for long-run estimation and feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) and panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) for robustness. The finding revealed significant negative effects of nuclear en-ergy consumption, environmental-related technology, population density and significant positive effects of globalization and economic growth on ecological footprint. These results are also robust by assessing the long-run impacts of predictors on carbon footprint and CO2 emissions as alternate ecological mea-sures. These conclusions provide the profound significance of nuclear energy consumption for envi-ronmentally sustainable development in the top ten ecological footprint countries and serve as an important reference for ecological security for other countries globally.(c) 2022 Korean Nuclear Society, Published by Elsevier Korea LLC. All rights reserved. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study investigates the impacts of environmental technology and globalization on nuclear energy consumption in the top ten ecological footprint countries. The findings show that nuclear energy consumption, environmental-related technology, and population density have negative effects on ecological footprint, while globalization and economic growth have positive effects.