Antinuclear

The “flawed and woefully incomplete” public data from the nuclear industry is leading to an over-confident attitude to risk, the researchers warned.

The study, which put fresh pressure on the nuclear industry to be more transparent with data on incidents, also called for a fundamental rethink of how accidents are rated, arguing that the current method (the discrete seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale or INES) is highly imprecise, poorly defined, and often inconsistent.

For example, the Fukushima accident and the Chernobyl accident are rated 7 — the maximum severity level — on the INES scale.

However, Fukushima alone would need a score of between 10 and 11 to represent the true magnitude of consequences, the researchers said.

Catastrophic nuclear accidents like Chernobyl disaster in the US that took place in 1986 and the more recent Japan’s Fukushima disasters in 2011 may not be relics of the past. But the risk…