A victim of the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific has been ordered to repay more than $US60,000 paid out in compensation to her.
Florence Bourel is a former secretary of the Atomic Energy Commission, who was sent to the weapons test site at Moruroa over a 12-year period.
She developed thyroid cancer which in 2002 was recognised as a work-related condition.
The explosion from a French nuclear test at Mururoa in French Polynesia. France conducted 193 tests between 1966 and 1996. Photo: AFP
The test veterans organisation in France reports that in 2008, a court ordered for her to be compensated but the health insurance successfully appealed the decision.
A reassessment placed her condition below the disability level eligible for compensation, which she says implies that nothing had ever happened to her.
She says out of her pension she has to repay $60,000 and there is no recourse.
She also says her daughters have also been affected and one of her grand-daughters had an operation for a radiation-induced disease.
