One person was killed and four were injured on Monday afternoon in an explosion at a nuclear waste treatment site in southern France, according to the French Nuclear Safety Authority
The authority and local police officials said there had been no radiation leak. The site about 20 miles from Avignon, has no nuclear reactors, the authority said.
A spokesperson for the French Atomic Energy Commission told the television channel LCI that "nothing has made it outside." A spokesman for the French power utility EDF, which owns the site, said that "it is an industrial accident, not a nuclear one."
"In this type of oven, there are two kinds of waste," he told Agence France-Press, "metallic waste, like tools and pumps," and "burnable waste, like gloves or technicians' overalls."
He said that "the fire caused by the explosion has been controlled."
A security perimeter was set up around the installation, fire fighters said, without providing further details.
The explosion reportedly took place in or near a foundry used to melt the waste, which has varying levels of radioactivity. The Centraco site is owned by EDF and is near the Marcoule nuclear research center, one of France's oldest. It produces fuel from recycled waste.
Cécile Duflot, a leader of the French Green Party, asked the government "for the greatest transparency, in real time, about the situation and the environmental and health consequences."
France gets 77 percent of its electricity from nuclear power.
Olivier Isnard, an emergency manager at France's Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety said that the explosion took place in the foundry of the waste processing plant, which was melting down about four tons of used radioactive metal. The cause of the explosion was not yet known, he said, but he stressed that the level of radiation - about 67,000 becquerels - contained in the molten metal was extremely low. "This is very, very low - nothing close to the radioactivity you would find inside a nuclear power plant," he said.
He said the fire had been extinguished and there was no damage to the foundry building itself. The building's air conditioning and ventilation systems continued to function normally and initial tests show no change to environmental radiation levels at the site, he said.
Nonetheless, he said, the safety agency dispatched a crisis team and a group of specialized firefighters to take air and soil samples for analysis, the results of which were expected later Monday.
"I expect these will confirm that there has been no environmental impact," said Mr. Isnard, who also spent a month in Japan as an adviser in the wake of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant in March.
NYT
