Preliminary study on global warming and human health impacts of nuclear power

Nuclear power helps us attain multiple aspects of sustainability, such as improving environment, health and economics. However, nuclear power comes with health risk of radiation, leading to different attitudes to the development of nuclear power, and it is thus necessary to make comprehensive analysis for the benefit and risk of nuclear power. Here we show the regional and global impacts of nuclear power on climate and human health based on three typical nuclear power projections from 2016 to 2050. The results show that nuclear power has competitive advantages over coal , even considering the radiation risk. In particular, less developed regions will benefit more from the replacement of coal by nuclear power. We also demonstrate that the projected global use of nuclear power to 2050 would prevent the temperature increase of 0.05 ∼ 0.22℃ and 1.7 ∼ 14.0 million deaths that would result from coal power, and the monetized benefits range from US$16.7 to US$115.0 trillion. (authors)