Sentiment Analysis on Twitter and Instagram Data towards Nuclear Waste

A magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11, 2011, caused core meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, leading Japan to begin discharging treated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean on August 24, 2023. This decision sparked global discussions on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. 9,794 tweets from Twitter and 3,042 posts from Instagram were collected to conducts sentiment analysis for assessing public sentiment and informing policymaking related to nuclear waste management. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) for sentiment analysis, the research finds a predominantly negative public sentiment towards the discharge of treated wastewater.