China on alert for nuclear accidents after quake

French authorities do not yet have a full picture of any possible damage at the nuclear weapons sites, where information is more closely guarded, Charles said.

He said he didn't think there were any leaks because it would have been reported and the worst concern was the degradation of buildings.

Nuclear experts said there were several possibilities if any significant damage occurred at the plants, at least one of which is alongside a river. A radioactive leak could cause environmental harm, while internal damage could set back China's nuclear modernization, they said.

Mianyang, an industrial city of 700,000 people that is the headquarters of China's nuclear weapons design industry, was in the disaster area.

A switchboard operator at the site, which has been likened to the U.S. nuclear facility at Los Alamos, N.M., said Saturday that people there were at work.

China's largest plutonium production reactor is also in the quake zone at Guangyuan.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said the Guangyuan reactor is "at the center of China's fissile material production" and damage "would disrupt China's warhead maintenance capabilities.

Matthew Bunn, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom, said the risk of radioactive leaks depended mostly on how the facilities were designed, details of which are known only by the Chinese government.

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Associated Press Writers Lily Hindy, Angela Charlton and Foster Klug contributed to this report.