Paris:
Radioactive cooling fluid leaked at a French nuclear reactor on Thursday following two small fires, but the spillage was safely collected in special tanks, officials said.
A reactor at the power plant in Penly on the English Channel near the port of Dieppe shut down automatically after two small fires broke out on Thursday, the plant's operator EDF said.
Fire fighters easily extinguished the blazes but a cooling pump was damaged, in turn causing a joint to leak radioactive water into collection tanks located inside the reactor building, EDF said.
The reactor continued to be cooled properly and teams were working to lower the water pressure, the company said.
EDF said the installation was secure, no one was injured, and there were "no consequences for the environment".
It was not clear what caused the fires but the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) said fire fighters had found small pools of burning oil but quickly extinguished the flames.
"These were pools of a few dozen square centimetres," said agency spokeswoman Evangelia Petit, adding the authority would make an inspection of the site Friday.
The ASN said in a statement that it had provisionally put the event at level 1 on the international INES scale, which classifies nuclear accidents at between 1 ("irregularity") and 7 ("major incident").
The agency said it was lifting the crisis situation that had been put in place on Thursday evening.