Assessing the Impact of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster on Policy Dynamics and the Public Sphere

Social and political fallout following the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster permanently altered the zeitgeist of global public attitude towards nuclear power and towards energy technology in general. This area of public policy, which in Japan is particularly opaque and stagnant, was forced into a period of energy sector review amid domestic and worldwide debate. This study explores novel methodologies for measuring these developments, covering the 1) framing effects of traditional media and the 2) user-sourced content of social media. This quantitative approach yielded the following hypothesis verifications; 1) in an AHP-style online survey, exposure to real and simulated nuclear-related disaster headlines reduced collective partiality towards nuclear power by 3% and 4% respectively, and 2) retrospective opinion mining of Twitter procured an relative increase in negative nuclear-related posts of 38% and 134% in Japanese and English respectively, from the pre to post-Fukushima world. Using nuclear power and Fukushima as a case study, this paper attempts to elucidate both the influence of media on the public sphere, and the influence of the public sphere on policy and policymakers. From the results it is possible to make the conjecture that a lack of scientific education with regard to energy issues increases the former influence, and similarly reduces the latter.