Project Manhattan
Security: factchecking
The power plants of Cattenom have often been attacked for security reasons. Just recently, in February, a fire breakout provoked international reactions, as you can see from these newspaper headlines.
The reactions
The accident
Alain Diesch's response
EDF's response
The INES scale
The INES scale is an international scale that helps to identify the gravity of nuclear accidents. There are 7 different levels of gravity.
Fun fact: As Alain Diesch tells us, there have always been 7 levels only until France added the "0"-level.
Now we still have 7 levels of gravity and one 0-level for nothing. As you can see on this graph on the right, the first 3 levels of gravity are still considered as "incidents". Beginning with the 4th level and ending with the 7th level, we have the actual accidents.
The French and INES
As we saw before with Alain Diesch, the "0 risk" does not exist anywhere. And even though the probability of any accident at nuclear power plants is quite low, we still have to admit that the "0 risk" does not exist. If we apply the INES scale to Cattenom it looks quite good. As you can read on the graph on the left side, Cattenom had in 2016 37 events of gravity 0 (so: nothing) and 6 incidents of gravity 1 (considered as anomaly).
The INES scale - historic examples
The INES scale was also invented in order to simplify information in case of any accident. Since we now know that contaminated clouds don't just simply stop at borders, an international scale of gravity seems logic. The table below cites all major, nuclear accidents our world has seen so far until 2008. Since 2008, this table has not been updated. That is the reason why the accidents of Fukushima are missing. Chernobyl and Fukushima were the only 2 accidents being qualified as major accident (=level 7) so far.