As Smythe pointed out, the INES scale ends at 7; a more severe accident than Fukushima in 2011 or Chernobyl in 1986 would also be measured as INES category 7. In addition, it is not continuous, not allowing a fine-grained comparison of nuclear incidents and accidents. But then, the most pressing item identified by Smythe is that INES conflates magnitude with intensity; a distinction long made by seismologists to describe earthquakes. In that area, magnitude describes the physical energy released by an earthquake, while the intensity focuses on the effects of the earthquake. In analogy, a nuclear incident with a high magnitude (e.g. a core meltdown) may not result in an intense radioactive contamination, as the incident at the Swiss research reactor in Lucens shows – but yet it resides in INES category 5, together with the Windscale fire of 1957, which has caused significant contamination outside of the facility.