Skepticblog » About the International Nuclear Event Scale - 0 views
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The INES scale is an internationally agreed-upon standard. Signatory nations are themselves responsible for interpreting the scale and assigning numbers to their own incidents. There is not a single international body that does this. Indeed, from the INES web site: What the Scale is Not For It is not appropriate to use INES to compare safety performance between facilities, organizations or countries. The statistically small numbers of events at Level 2 and above and the differences between countries for reporting more minor events to the public make it inappropriate to draw international comparisons.
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the INES number is not a “threat level”. It’s a rough assessment of the scale of a mess that has been created. It does not portend coming danger, it characterizes an incident.
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Within Japan, it’s the NSC (Nuclear Safety Commission) that has responsibility for classifying its incidents. When they say Fukushima is a 7, it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as what the USSR considered to be a 7 in 1986. Why not? Because there are many different aspects to a nuclear incident. There are health effects, potential health effects, environmental effects, measurements of radiation released, and so on.
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The scale boils all these factors down to a single number, which to me, is a misguided effort: 0 – No safety significance 1 – Anomaly 2 – Incident 3 – Serious incident 4 – Accident with local consequences 5 – Accident with wider consequences 6 – Serious accident 7 – Major accident I certainly agree that Fukushima is a 7, a major accident, considering its type of reactor. Chernobyl was a Generation 0 atomic pile, not really what you’d call a nuclear reactor, and I’m surprised it didn’t blow up half the continent. For a proper nuclear reactor, I think Fukushima is about as bad as things can get.
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But notice, it does not fulfill some of the qualifications of a 7, or even of a 4. For example, people start dying from radiation as early as 4 on the scale. Nobody has died from radiation at Fukushima (three were killed by the tsunami), and nobody was hurt at all at Three Mile Island which was a 5. The grimmest rational estimates of Chernobyl put its eventual death toll from cancer at 4,000. But it does fulfill the other qualifications of a 7; notably: Major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures.