At Mururoa Atoll, France conducted atmospheric nuclear tests until 1974. French authorities have been underestimating the number of people affected by radiation from nuclear tests on Pacific atolls for years, and the actual number could be over 100,000, according to a new study released this week. The French investigative journalism website Disclose, experts from Princeton University in the United States, and the British company Interprt, after studying some 2,000 declassified French military documents, talking to witnesses, and making calculations, have concluded that atmospheric nuclear tests in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1974 caused significantly more damage to the local population than official reports indicate.
According to the study’s authors, radioactive fallout could have affected about 110,000 people, the entire population of Tahiti and the neighboring Leeward Islands, including all 80,000 residents of Tahiti’s capital, Papeete. For 30 years, France tested its nuclear weapons on islands in the Pacific Ocean, including the famous test site at Mururoa Atoll. Until 1974, nuclear charges were detonated, including in the air. Then, following the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, France switched exclusively to underground testing. The authors of the study paid special attention to three nuclear explosions in the atmosphere over Mururoa Atoll – the tests of 1966, 1971 and 1974, code-named “Aldébaran,” “Enceladus” and “Centaur. It was the reconstruction of the movement of radioactive clouds and fallout that allowed the authors to claim that almost the entire population of French Polynesia was affected by these tests. According to their estimates, the scale of the consequences of the last atmospheric test alone, “Centaur”, could have been underestimated by the French authorities by about 40%.
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During this nuclear test, the mushroom cloud did not rise to the predicted height of nine kilometers, but only to 5200 meters, and the cloud did not move north, as scientists and the military had hoped, but to the west, towards Tahiti, whose population of thousands was in no way protected from radioactive fallout. “The state has gone to great lengths to bury the toxic legacy of these tests, and this is the first truly independent attempt to scientifically measure the extent of the damage and acknowledge the existence of thousands of victims of France’s nuclear experiments in the Pacific Ocean,” Jeffrey Livolsi, editor-in-chief of Disclose, told journalists.
The French authorities as a whole don’t deny the existence of affected people, including those who have developed cancer as a result of the nuclear tests – it’s just that, according to the authors of a new study, the authorities significantly underestimate the number of affected people. Thus, researchers believe that only after “Centaur” all 110 thousand inhabitants of Tahiti and the Windward Islands could receive a dose of radiation of one millisievert or more – it is this threshold that the authorities have set as a criterion for compensating cancer patients. The following sentence can be translated into English as
“The study cites a document from the Ministry of Health of Polynesia stating that approximately 11,000 people received a dose of five millisieverts or more.”
Tahiti. Half a century ago, radioactive fallout occurred here.
In addition, researchers cite secret military correspondence from 2017 in which the military allegedly admits for the first time that a full third – 2,000 out of 6,000 – of the soldiers and officers who participated in nuclear tests in Polynesia from 1966 to 1974 have since been diagnosed with at least one form of cancer. In 2010, the French authorities created a commission to compensate victims of nuclear testing. Compensation will be paid to those who were exposed to high doses of radiation and subsequently developed one of the forms of cancer specifically caused by radiation. To date, only 454 people have received such compensation, and only 63 of them are local Polynesians.
