Re-framing Nuclear Energy within the European Green Deal : Preference Congruence from Public Consultations to Debates in the European Parliament

How do major turning points such as external geopolitical impacts reshape the framing of nuclear energy in the European Union? Within seven separate European Green Deal (EGD) initiatives related to energy and climate nexus, nuclear energy has consistently emerged as a contentious focal point. The consultation corpus includes 4,446 submissions, of which 1,897 reference nuclear-related keywords. This demonstrates that nuclear energy is a recurring source of controversy across multiple EGD dossiers, rather than a topic confined to a single issue. This analysis is informed by significant two exogenous shocks that have reconfigured the climate-energy relationship in the EGD, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has escalated the EU’s concerns regarding energy security and independence, and the US’s announcement of Inflation Reduction Act, which has triggered the EU’s emphasis on future technological leadership and industrial competitiveness. This paper aims to investigate how nuclear energy has been reframed within the EGD by particularly focusing on reframing progress from participatory inputs to parliamentary debates. The empirical investigation integrates responses from public consultations with speeches in the European Parliament (EP) across seven EGD-related legislative and policy initiatives, particularly focusing on how the members of European Parliament symbolically deploy nuclear energy to redefine the green energy. The study employs a semi-supervised topic modelling technique, guided by theory-driven frame seeds from existing EGD studies and draw comparable frames. This approach is supplemented with keyword-in-context extraction and probabilistic stance detection to identify the framing of supportive, oppositional, or conditionally supportive towards nuclear energy. This methodological framework allows for a systematic, cross-initiative analysis of reframing dynamics and the congruence between consultation input and parliamentary discourse within the context of EU climate governance. The findings of the paper will suggest how nuclear energy has been strategically reframed using distinct discursive lenses depending on the policy context.