After Algerian independence ended testing in the Sahara, France established the Centre d'experimentation du Pacifique in 1963 and converted the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa in French Polynesia into a nuclear test site, conducting 193 tests between 1966 and 1996 — 46 in the atmosphere until 1974 and the remainder underground. Populated islands downwind, including the Gambiers and Tureia, were exposed to fallout without evacuation; the French authorities maintained for decades that the tests were clean and denied harm, a position they began to retreat from with the Morin Law of 2010, which created a compensation scheme administered by CIVEN. Declassified documents underpinning the 2021 Moruroa Files investigation by Disclose and Princeton researchers indicated that fallout doses were substantially higher than the state had acknowledged and that roughly 110,000 people, nearly the whole population of the territory, may have been exposed above compensation thresholds. President Macron acknowledged in 2021 that France owed a debt to French Polynesia, while rejecting the language of deliberate concealment. The atlas covered Maralinga and Bikini but not Moruroa.
France appropriated two atolls in the Tuamotu group as a nuclear test site and conducted 193 atmospheric and underground tests, exposing the Maohi population of French Polynesia to fallout
The 1962 French Polynesian census counted 84,551 people, rising to about 110,000 by the early 1970s. The two atolls appropriated as the test site, Moruroa and Fangataufa, were uninhabited, but reconstructions of fallout from the 41 atmospheric tests - including the 2021 Moruroa Files study using declassified CEA data - conclude that a large majority of the territory's population, on the order of 110,000 people, received measurable doses.
No death toll can be established. Excess cancers attributable to fallout are inferred statistically rather than counted, and estimates depend on dose reconstructions that France and independent researchers disagree about. CIVEN has compensated a few hundred claimants, most of them former test-site workers, which is a measure of recognised claims rather than of mortality.
French Polynesia