Deciphering Public Opinion of Nuclear Energy on Twitter

This paper explores nuclear energy-related Twitter discussions as a response to the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize won by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. We have considered a total of 2 million tweets for these two events. In particular, we employed CNN, LSTM, and Bi-LSTM to investigate whether social media users are supportive or cynical about nuclear energy. Our AI algorithms have performed better for polarity detection (accuracy in the range of 90%) with respect to subjectivity detection (accuracy in the range of 75%). We also note that dominant aspects of supporting tweets revolve around concepts like clean energy, lower CO2 emission, and sustainable future. On the contrary, cynical users see nuclear energy as a threat to the environment, human life, and safety.