France's ecology minister is calling for tests of the ground water near all of the country's 58 nuclear reactors after a uranium leak at a plant in the south polluted the local water supply.
"I don't want people to feel that we are hiding anything from them," Jean-Louis Borloo said in a newspaper interview Thursday.
Residents in the Vaucluse region of southern France have been told not to drink water or eat fish from nearby rivers after the liquid uranium spill on July 7 at the Tricastin nuclear plant.
Swimming and water sports were also forbidden as was irrigation of crops with the contaminated water.
French authorities last week ordered the closure of a nuclear treatment facility at the plant, which is run by Socatri, a subsidiary of French nuclear giant Areva (CEI.FR).
But Borloo said he wanted a government committee on nuclear safety to look into the environmental conditions at the sites, "in particular the state of the ground water located near all of the French nuclear plants must be verified."
"I'm told that everything is under control, but I want to be sure," Borloo told Le Parisien newspaper.
France is home to the world's second largest network of nuclear reactors after the U.S. and the facilities generate more than 80% of its electricity.
While the spill at Tricastin took place at a treatment facility and did not affect the reactor, Borloo stressed that in the area of nuclear energy "there is no room for negligence."
Following tests, the IRSN nuclear safety institute said it had pinpointed four areas where there are abnormally high levels of uranium in the ground water and that this could not have been caused by the Tricastin leak alone.
A separate commission has raised the possibility that the contamination may be linked to military nuclear waste buried at an underground storage site from 1964 to 1976 at the Tricastin plant.
Tricastin is located in the town of Bollene in the Vaucluse, some 50 kilometres from the city of Avignon.
The president of Areva, Anne Lauvergeon, was due to visit the plant Friday to personally assess the state of safety measures after the leak.
The leakage occurred when liquid was transferred from one container to another at the Tricastin site, which has a nuclear reactor as well as a radioactive treatment plant.
The leak ranked as a level-one incident on the seven-point scale to rank nuclear accidents.