On Thursday morning the BBC reported that an explosion and a fire occurred in a turbine room at the Flamanville nuclear power plant on the western shore of France, although officials assured the public that there was no risk of nuclear contamination. The fire occurred in a building that housed the turbine that turns steam into electricity, “a few dozen yards from the nuclear reactor, which is isolated by a thick cement wall,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Plant operators shut down reactor 1 at the two-reactor site (reactor 2 is still online). No one was hurt in the incident, but five workers reported feeling ill and were evaluated for smoke inhalation. According to Le Monde, plant operators ruled out an act of malice and suggested that the explosion and fire were due to overheating, although an official cause has not been determined yet.

According to The Independent, the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) said the fire originated in a fan underneath an alternator.

The incident comes as opinion and economics are challenging the popularity of nuclear energy in Europe. France derives a considerable amount of its electricity from nuclear power, but some other European nations, notably Germany, remain “broadly opposed” to nuclear power, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Construction has been ongoing at Flamanville to build a next-generation “evolutionary pressurized water reactor” (EPR), built by the majority-state-owned reactor engineering company Areva. The construction for Flamanville 3 began in 2007 with the aim to bring the reactor into service by 2012. But the project has run far over deadline and over budget.

Matters were complicated in 2015 when the French government set a ceiling of 63.2 GW of installed nuclear electricity generation capacity in the country, according to Électricité de France (EDF), the majority-state-owned power company that operates Flamanville (PDF). An EDF press release from January 2017 noted that due to the nuclear electricity generation capacity ceiling, “the commissioning of the Flamanville 3 EPR is conditional upon the shutdown, on the same date, of an equivalent generation capacity.” A 39-year-old power plant in Fessenheim, one of the oldest power plants in France, was chosen for closure. The press release noted that Flamanville 3 should come online in 2018.

Winds of change

In other European energy news, the trade group WindEurope announced on Thursday that installed wind energy capacity overtook installed coal capacity in 2016. That makes gas-fired generation Europe’s leader in installed capacity, while wind comes in second and coal comes in third.

Coal, however, is still second in total power generation in Europe, due to the fact that wind only produces power intermittently.

There's been an explosion of investment in wind technology in Europe, partly driven by offshore wind installations, which are more common in Europe than in the US. According to Bloomberg the offshore wind segment attracted €18.2 billion, or about $19.4 billion, offsetting a 29 percent decline in onshore wind investment, helping realize a 5 percent increase in total wind investment from the year before.

Correction: This article originally stated that the turbine at Flamanville caught fire. Officials have only said that the fire took place in the turbine hall.