Page - 210 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

investing in renewables cost more than the expansion of the power plant? Are renewables safer and cleaner than nuclear energy? How does the commitment to either nuclear or renewable energy production conform to international trends? Should Hungarians be worried about Russia as a contractor and creditor for the new reactors? Does the public support the expansion of the power plant or do they prefer renewable energy production? Which mode of energy production is sustainable and why? This paper analyses the arguments about sustainability for Hungary’s new nuclear reactors and renewable energy sources in political, environmental protectionist, scientific and expert discourses. We aim at exploring how the Hungarian Government, the green political party, LMP, Greenpeace, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Energy Club, an expert policy institute refer to sustainability and discuss the different aspects of it. The results of our topos analyses of nuclear and renewable energy suggest that sustainability is a marginal consideration in the Hungarian energy debate, which is centred around being economical. 2. Prevalent topics in the Hungarian nuclear energy debate Topoi, in the rhetorical tradition, mean ‘places’ from which arguments are developed and are considered the subject-matter indicators of argumentative discourse. Speakers and writers can take topoi into account in the process of finding arguments (Culler 2015; Eriksson 2012; Rubinelli 2009; van Eemeren 2010). We carried out two separate topos analyses in order to show what subject-matters are the most prevalent in the discourse about the Hungarian nuclear expansion. The first topos analysis concerned the arguments about the expansion and nuclear energy (Egres-Petschner in press). In this paper, we contrast the result of our previous study with a second topos analysis in which we studied the arguments pertaining to RES in the same research corpus. For both topos analyses, we examined all the articles that mentioned the expansion from 2009 (when the Parliament voted the provisional acceptance) until March 2017 (when the European Union gave permission to the construction) from the official websites1 of the following actors. For political bodies, we chose the pro-expansion Hungarian Government (N = 111) and the green political party named LMP (N = 184). The environmental protectionist group Greenpeace (N = 38) has been campaigning for RES in Hungary, and so has the NGO turned policy institute called Energy Club (N = 69). To contrast this expert organisation, we selected the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (N = 10), which did not communicate a unified stance on the issue. Our initial classification of topoi was based on previous literature (Gamson-Modigliani 1989; Kristiansen 2017; Sarlós 2014; Schweitzer 2013; Ylönen et al. 2015) and our familiarity with themes in political, media and public discourse. The list of topoi was refined in an iterative process. The analysis resulted in the following eight topoi which we found the most common in the selected discourses about the nuclear expansion: economy, finance, energy supply, safety, environment, legality, ethics and international politics2 (Egres-Petschner in press). These topoi essentially cover the list of questions we mentioned in the Introduction. We first overview the 1 Websites of the collected articles: http://www.kormany.hu/hu/hirek (articles are accessible only after 2014), http://lehetmas.hu/hirek/, http://www.greenpeace.org/hungary/hu/hirek/, https://www.energiaklub.hu/hirek, www.mta.hu/hirek 2 The topos of international politics was named ‘Relationship with Russia’ in our previous study. 210