No doubt you were staggered by the German government’s announcement that ‘122 incidents were subject to reporting at the country's nuclear power plants last year’.

Well, how about this. According to the French nuclear watchdog ASN’s 2007 annual report, at France’s nuclear power plants last year, there were 928 events were recorded on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the measure introduced after Chernobyl to communicate incidents at nuclear installations.

That’s 928 events. In one year. That’s over two events a day, every day, for year.