Paris releases 10 million euros for victims of nuclear testing

France announced Tuesday the grant, half a century after its first nuclear tests in the Sahara, of an initial compensation package of 10 million euros to hundreds of civilian and military victims, whose injury has long been denied.

•     Thirteen years after the end of the tests in the Pacific and the ratification by France of the test-ban treaty, it was time that our country is at peace, said Minister of Defense Hervé Morin, introducing at a press conference a bill for compensation.
  
      Compensation could involve a few hundred people about 150,000 civilian employees and military personnel who had participated from 1960 to 1996 in the Sahara and in Polynesia, he said.
  
      This former military or former civilian employees such as the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), but also Algerians or Polynesians who lived near the test areas, said the Department of Defense.
  
      For all the victims, with far different regimes, the implementation decrees will set a list of 18 diseases (leukemia, breast cancer, thyroid ...).
  
      The list will be modelled on that established by an agency of the United Nations, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCAER). It may however be extended at the option of changing of medical knowledge.
  
      The Department of Defense recognizes several incidents during which four tests conducted in galleries in the Sahara that were not completely confined, especially the 1st May 1962 when the fallout had been recorded within a band of more than 150 km.
  
      In Polynesia, according to the same source, about 41 air tests, a dozen radioactive fallout have been noted on the atolls surrounding six of which have had a radiological impact.
  
      
  Ennaharonline/ M. O.