I originally wrote this because I gave a presentation on nuclear power in one of my friend's high school classes, and the students wanted to know how many people died from their energy use—your so-called deathprint. Skip ahead if you don't care about the calculations.
Hey, I ran some calculations for your students. I couldn't find exactly the per capita energy usage for an American, so taking some averages and estimations I went with 90,000 kWh/yr. The deathprint numbers come in deaths per PWh, so I use the equation $$k = \frac{a\ell d}{10^{15}\, Wh}$$ where k is the amount of people you kill over your whole life, a is your annual energy consumption, $\ell$ is your life expectancy, d is the death rate multiplier (variable by energy source). I could have included the 1E15 Watt-hours in d, but it's easier to plug in this way.
Plugging in everything but d gives us $$k = \frac{d(9E10\, Wh/yr)(80\, yr)}{10^{15}\, Wh} = 0.0072d$$ Now it's time to calculate d.
From the eia.gov site, it says that in 2015 the US energy production mix was 32% natural gas, 28% petroleum, 21% coal (see footnote 1), 11% renewables, and nuclear electric 9%. You may notice that's only 91%. The remaining 9% was primarily petroleum imports, so we'll bump our petroleum up to 37%.
So we have $$d = (0.37\times 36000) + (0.32\times 4000) + (0.21\times 15000) + (0.11\times r) + (0.09\times 40) = 17753.6 + (0.11\times r)\, deaths$$
Now we have to figure out r (renewables factor). Using the EIA site again we get 49% is biomass, 25% is hydro (see footnote 2), 19% is wind, 6% is solar, and 2% is geothermal. So (this is just an estimate) $$r = (0.49\times 24000) + (0.25\times 100) + (0.19\times 150) + (0.06\times 440) + (0.02\times 0) = 11839.9$$ I put 0 in on the death rate multiplier for geothermal because I couldn't find any info on it. We plug that in and get $$d = 17753.6 + (0.11\times11839.9) = 19056 \, deaths$$
Skip to here if you're just looking for a number
Plugging that into our original equation we find that $$k = 0.0072\times 19056 = {\boxed{\color{#9fc5e8}\text{137 people killed per lifetime}}}$$ If it was 100% nuclear, d would be 40 and k would equal 0.3 people killed per lifetime. That, of course, is factoring in all the major accidents (using outdated technology) and the linear no threshold model, which has been proven to be false. Using updated science, the number would be much lower than 0.3 (see Footnote 3).
Once again, this is using the energy mix from 2015. We all know that the energy mix of 2035 will look pretty different from 2015. But with these numbers we can approximate that the average 16-year-old American has indirectly killed 27 people (or approx. one every 7 months). The actual number is higher than that because a) coal usage peaked in 2008, and b) a lot of energy-intensive processes that we benefit from have been moved to other countries, so those aren't counted in the consumption profile.
If all that energy was 100% nuclear derived, your students would have collaterally killed about 6% of a person each. In other words, it would take 17 students to have killed one person. At this energy consumption rate, you would have to live for 278 years to kill one person. This only accounts for energy production though, nothing about food, technology, or conveniences.
These are just some quick calculations using numbers I found. You (or your students) could do a much more in-depth research project by finding a lot more data points (see Footnote 4). Hope you enjoyed it! Also, you should tell your students to read my books :) I believe they're available at the school library. If not, they're available here.
Footnote 1 The world average is 100,000 deaths/PWh and the Chinese rate is 170,000 deaths/PWh. I used the US number of 15,000.
Footnote 2 This is the European number which doesn't include the Banqiao dam break that killed 171,000.
Footnote 3 This is infeasible, but a fun thought experiment. Switching over to entirely nuclear would result in a 99.93% reduction of the deathprint. The reduction would be greater if you factored in the performance history of the nuclear navy, which has logged "over 6200 reactor-years of accident-free experience involving 526 nuclear reactor cores over the course of 240 million kilometres, without a single radiological incident, over a period of more than 50 years." (Source)
Footnote 4 Here's the full equation if you want to tweak parameters:$$k = \frac{a\ell}{10^{15}\, Wh}[p_{pt}d_{pt} + p_{ng}d_{ng} + p_{co}d_{co} + p_{nu}d_{nu} + p_{re}(p_{bi}d_{bi} + p_{hy}d_{hy} + p_{wi}d_{wi} + p_{so}d_{so} + p_{gt}d_{gt})]$$ It's kind of a crappy formula because the p values (ha) are the percentages of the energy mix, except the ones in the square brackets are the percentage of the renewable energy mix.
