International Nuclear Event Scale - Criticism

Criticism

Deficiencies in the existing INES have emerged through comparisons between the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Firstly, the scale is essentially a discrete qualitative ranking, not defined beyond event level 7. Secondly, it was designed as a public relations tool, not an objective scientific scale. Thirdly, its most serious shortcoming is that it conflates magnitude with intensity. David Smythe has proposed a new quantitative nuclear accident magnitude scale (NAMS).

Nuclear experts say that the "INES emergency scale is very likely to be revisited" given the confusing way in which it was used in the 2011 Japanese nuclear accidents.

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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
    Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

    The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
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    The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
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