Spain's nuclear safety body on Tuesday accused the power company Endesa of downplaying the importance of a radioactive leak at one of its plants.
The body, the CSN, said Endesa, which owns the Asco I nuclear plant in the eastern province of Tarragona, could face unspecified penalties for providing "incomplete information" about a radioactive leak during a maintenance operation on November 26.
The leak was only revealed on April 4. During a subsequent inspection on April 5 and 7, the CSN said the leak was more serious than Endesa had revealed.
"The importance of the leak was a hundred times more than the plant declared last week," the CSN's deputy head of radiologicial safety, Manuel Rodriguez, had told the newspaper El Pais.
However, the CSN said in a statement said there was no danger to the local population or the staff at the plant.
Following the incident, the body decided to reclassify the incident from level one to level two on the seven-tier international scale of nuclear incidents.
