News
Publish date: March 24, 2009
News
An initial sum of €10 million ($14 million) has been set aside for military and civilian staff as well as local populations who fell ill from radiation exposure, Defence Minister Herve Morin said.
Some 150,000 civilian and military personnel took part in the 210 nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara desert and the Pacific between 1960 and 1996.
"It’s time for France to be true to its conscience," Morin told Le Figaro newspaper.
The move was welcomed by French veterans who had been waging a long campaign for the state to recognise its responsibility toward ageing and sick staff of its nuclear programme.
"This is a step forward that we are greeting with satisfaction," Michel Leger, president of the Association of Veterans of Nuclear Tests, told AFP.
Leger recalled he was "wearing shorts and a hat, lying on the ground without protective eyewear, arms folded over my eyes" when an above-ground test took place 40 kilometres (25 miles) away, in southern Algeria in the early 1960s.
"Afterwards, there was no medical checkup," said Leger, who now suffers from cardiovascular illnesses.
One of the world’s five declared nuclear powers, France carried out 17 nuclear tests in Algeria in the early 1960s including four atmospheric trials, AFP reported.
Recent attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant "mark the beginning of a new and gravely dangerous front of the war," the UN atomic agency's director general said last week.
After years of inaction, Germany is working on its Carbon Management Strategy to resolve how CCS can play a role in climate action in industry. At the end of February, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action published first key points and a proposal to amend the law Kohlenstoffdioxid Speicherungsgesetz (KSpG). Bellona Deutschland, who was actively involved in the previous stakeholder dialogue submitted a statement in the association hearing.
In the midst of a global discussion on whether natural gas should be used as a transitional fuel and whether emissions from its extraction, production, transport and use are significantly less than those from other fossil fuels, Russia has developed ambitious plans to increase its own production of liquified natural gas (LNG) in the Arctic – a region with 75% of proven gas reserves in Russia – to raise its share in the international gas trade.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our main focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution risks and climate change.