International Nuclear Event Scale INES rating. Further, the actual accident damage values do not reflect the INES scores. A quantifiable, continuous scale might be preferable to the INES, in the same way that the antiquated Mercalli scale for earthquake magnitudes was superseded by the continuous physically-based Richter scale. The following arguments have been proposed: firstly, the scale is essentially a discrete qualitative ranking, not defined beyond event level 7. Secondly, it was designed as a public relations tool, not an objective scientific scale. Thirdly, its most serious shortcoming is that it conflates magnitude and intensity. An alternative nuclear accident magnitude scale (NAMS) was proposed
Magnitude (astronomy) by astronomers are: The difference between these concepts can be seen by comparing two stars. Betelgeuse (apparent magnitude 0.5, absolute magnitude −5.8) appears slightly dimmer in the sky than Alpha Centauri (apparent magnitude 0.0, absolute magnitude 4.4) even though it emits thousands of times more light, because Betelgeuse is much farther away. Under the modern logarithmic magnitude scale, two objects, one of which is used as a reference or baseline, whose intensities (brightnesses) measured from Earth in units of power per unit area (such as watts per square metre, W m) are and , will have magnitudes and related by