Question: what are radiological catastrophes

Becky Martin answered on 13 Mar 2014:

Hi Jack,

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.