Pictures of smoke coming out of the reactor building at Penly nuclear power station sent a shiver down the spine of the French television viewer.
Around lunchtime on April 5, unit 2 had an emergency shutdown and external firefighters were called in to put out two fires of oil that had spilled from a primary cooling pump. In the early evening the operator realized that cooling water was leaking. It took until 4 o'clock the next morning to stop the loss of coolant from a damaged joint of the pump.
The event is a powerful reminder that something can go wrong anytime at any of the 58 reactors in the country. Between 600 and 800 "significant events" in nuclear power plants are registered every year in France.