The Czech Office of Nuclear Safety on Tuesday criticised the decision of the European Commission to dispatch a team of experts to the Czech nuclear power plant Temelin after a weekend leak of radioactive water.

"I consider the sending of this mission an exaggeration," Dana Drabova, the office's president, told Czech news wire CTK.

"The breakdown was immediately examined by German experts who judged it to be unimportant," she added.

Drabova said that she knew nothing about the planned mission to the plant in the south of the country, 60 kms (36 miles) from the Austrian border, and stressed again that the accident had not threatened anyone's safety.

"There have been 22 missions from the Atomic Agency there," Drabova told

Austrian representatives have criticised the delay with which they said the Czech side gave information about the defect. The Bavarian Environment Ministry has demanded a detailed explanation of the latest defect at the station.

But Drabova insisted that the Czech Republic informed neighbouring countries of the accident in time.

The Czechs have an agreement with neighbouring Austria and Germany to inform them of any incident within 78 hours and they did so within 24 hours, she said.

"The agreement does not set the dates for the provision of detailed information," Drabova said, adding that the nuclear safety office would be glad to provide details about the water leak to the neighbouring countries.

Drabova said that the media interest in Temelin, which was launched in 2000, was being provoked by non-governmental organisations.

She said she believed that Temelin was under much stricter supervision than others.

For instance, Drabova claimed that in an incident one month ago an amount of radioactive water 10 times larger than the Temelin incident leaked out of a German nuclear power plant directly into the Rhine.

She said that incident had provoked little interest from the public.

The Czech Foreign Ministry also said that the Czech Republic did not violate the international agreement on informing about incidents.