Workers in protective suits, decontamination tents and a staged evacuation were part of a large-scale nuclear emergency drill carried out Wednesday on Hong Kong's farthest-flung island, which stands near mainland Chinese reactors.

The drill took place on sparsely-populated Tung Ping Chau, a remote island much closer to the mainland than the rest of Hong Kong and around 20 kilometres away from the Daya Bay nuclear power plant in China's city of Shenzhen.

Around 100 tourists and residents joined 3,000 government staff to create drill scenarios on the rugged island and at ferry piers in Hong Kong's northern New Territories, which received evacuation boats.

Experts from the Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute (IRSN) in France, which specialises in nuclear emergency response and radiation protection, helped design the drill.

Wednesday's exercise measured radiation levels in the air and on the ground and set up pop-up shower tents for people exposed. Actors with mock blood on their cheeks were guided to police boats on a beach to evacuate.

On the second day of the exercise, "patient treatment and decontamination" at a hospital would be tested, the government said in a statement.

The exercise simulating a leak at the Daya Bay plant is held every three to five years to test the efficacy of the Hong Kong government's contingency plan, the security bureau said.

Plans for Daya Bay sparked huge protests in Hong Kong in the 1980s, when it was still a British colony, with one million people signing a petition against nuclear power.

But there has never been a major incident at the plant, which opened in 1993.

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About 200 people working at the site of a cutting-edge nuclear reactor under construction in northern France were evacuated Tuesday after smoke was detected at the site, officials said. The workers were evacuated "as a precaution", authorities in the Manche region said in a statement, adding that firefighters deployed to the Flamanville site on the Normandy coast had contained the smoke. ... read more

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