A catastrophe is an extreme event that causes great and sudden damage or suffering; generally considered to be on a larger scale than a disaster. A nuclear or radiation catastrophe is one that is specifically due to nuclear or radiation accident; for instance, Fukushima or Chernobyl could be considered to be catastrophes.
There is actually a lot of discussion about how we define catastrophe, disaster, accident, risk, vulnerability and hazard within my research area; and the words, or ontologies, that we use for these concepts are pretty important.
There are a number of different ways of describing nuclear accidents. I think catastrophe works well for large-scale nuclear or radiological events, because it comes from the Latin, catastropha, which means an overturning or a sudden end.
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