'Precautions Are Strict'

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31098, 29 June 1966, Page 17

'Precautions Are Strict'

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright) PARIS, June 28. France has taken stringent precautions to prevent any effect on human health from the forthcoming French nuclear tests in the South Pacific, a Government pamphlet said yesterday.

“Compared with measures taken for hundreds of tests carried out by other countries, and which did not, ' moreover, significantly raise the level of radiation of the human environment, these precautions appear particularly strict,” it said. The French had carried out a thorough study—including three years of observations by some 15 Polynesian weather stations —of the wind and weather in the test area, south-east of Tahiti, the pamphlet said. “All precautions have been taken so that the French tests will in no way affect the health of populations close to or far from the tests sites and so that their activities

<• l will be affected as little as possible.” The pamphlet said it had been shown that only the short-range fall-out from an j atomic test—as differentiated ifrom long-range and global I —was dangerous. It defined short-range fallout as that composed of material thrown up into the atmosphere by the explosion and which falls back to earth over a distance varying with the force of the explosion, which can spread to 250 miles in the direction of the wind, about 31 miles cross-wind and which contains “a high proportion of short-lived radioactive material.” Prevailing winds in the Pacific would normally - carry short-range faTl-out in a sector between the north-east and the east, “in the direction of the uninhabited atolls of the the Actaeon group.” Firing Condition The pamphlet added: “The order to fire will not be given if the zone of predictable fallout includes any inhabited

place whatever.” The dangers to humans of radioactive contamination through drinking water or fish were “practically imposjsibTe” because of the dilution of radiation in seawater, the pamphlet said. Surveillance measures would be taken during the tests by systematic fishing and by examination of fish for sale in local markets, the pamphlet said.