Digital innovation and public acceptance of nuclear energy in the green transition

Abstract Public acceptance is widely regarded as a binding constraint on the contribution of nuclear energy to the green transition, yet claims that digital innovation will ease this constraint have rarely been examined against social science evidence. This topical review asks under what conditions digital innovation in nuclear energy systems, in particular digital twins, artificial intelligence (AI)-based predictive maintenance and the digitally supported design, manufacture and operation of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), can contribute to public acceptance of nuclear energy. The analysis draws on five strands of scholarship that are seldom brought into contact with the technical literature: risk perception research, cultural theory of risk, the deficit and engagement models of science communication, the social licence to operate, and socio-technical transitions theory, which serves as the integrating framework. Reading techno-optimistic claims through these lenses, the review identifies three structural barriers: a cybersecurity paradox, whereby the connectivity that enables digital safety functions simultaneously expands the attack surface; an economic gap, specific to SMRs, whereby projected cost reductions rest on serial-production assumptions that recent project experience has not supported; and a transparency fallacy, whereby information disclosure is expected to build trust although meta-analytic evidence links the benefit and risk perceptions associated with acceptance to trust rather than to knowledge. These barriers are argued to interact: cyber incidents could act as trust-destroying signal events, cost failures could undermine perceived institutional competence, and one-way transparency tools leave procedural justice concerns unaddressed. The review concludes that digital innovation is more likely to support acceptance when it is embedded in genuinely participatory engagement, when institutions demonstrably manage the new risks digitalisation creates, when economic claims are validated rather than promised, and when regulatory frameworks confer procedural legitimacy. Absent these conditions, digitalisation risks reproducing deficit-model assumptions that acceptance research has long found wanting.