Environment and Climate
Public perceptions and public uptake of expert (re)framings of nuclear energy in the context of climate change
Principal Investigator:
Nuclear energy has been increasingly recast as a clean energy technology that is crucial in global efforts to mitigate climate change. This reframing of nuclear energy gained more prominence especially after the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement which nearly every nation in the world signed, marking a significant shift in global efforts to ramp up climate action. This discourse, however, has been led mainly by policy and technical experts (Bickerstaff et al. 2008). Little is known about the public uptake of this (re)framing of nuclear energy. Some research indirectly address this question, but mainly focused on the social, cognitive and cultural factors that influence public acceptance of nuclear energy as a response to climate change.
This study investigates public perceptions of nuclear energy in relation to climate change, and public uptake of expert framings of nuclear energy as key to climate change mitigation. The analysis is guided by the following empirical research questions:
- What are the major topics in the public discussion on social media on nuclear energy in the context of climate change between 2015 and 2020? And how do these emergent topics relate with each other?
- How do tweets generated in Singapore and Weibo posts generated in China differ in the way they talk about nuclear energy and climate change in terms of topic prevalence and topic content? How does this differ from the topic prevalence and topic content in “the world” (i.e. global tweets)?
- What are the thematic similarities and differences between expert framings and the lay public’s discussions about nuclear energy in relation to climate change?
The specific objectives of the study are as follows:
- To enhance our understanding of public perceptions about nuclear energy in relation to climate change in Asia, specifically Singapore and China (RQ1&2).
- To evaluate the extent of public uptake of policy and technical expert (re)framing of nuclear energy as clean energy and important in climate change mitigation (RQ3).
