For those who remember the 1970s and ’80s in this country, there was anger and a real sense of moral outrage that a European colonial power would choose to play with Armageddon-like weapons in this part of the world.
"If they’re so safe, test them in Paris", was one bumper sticker at the time.
That anger turned to fury in July 1985 when, in an act of state-sponsored terrorism, French secret agents used limpet mines to blow up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, killing photographer Fernando Pereira.
The vessel was about to leave to protest against nuclear tests at Mururoa.
In all, France conducted almost 200 nuclear tests in the Pacific between 1966 and 1996. The real impact of these explosions on humans and the environment is difficult to quantify, but two years ago the BBC reported on an international study which used declassified documents to estimate about 110,000 people in French Polynesia were affected by radioactive fallout.
New Zealand navy veterans are also among those badly affected by the French tests.
RNZ reported in June that the 242 men aboard the HMNZS Otago and HMNZS Canterbury, who sailed to Mururoa Atoll to lead a government-backed protest against testing in 1973, have suffered and are still suffering from radiation-related cancers and genetic illnesses.
Thursday this week marked the 55th anniversary of France exploding a hydrogen bomb at Fangataufa Atoll in French Polynesia, making it the world’s fifth thermonuclear nation.
The enormous tsunami generated by the magnitude 9.0 offshore earthquake on March 11 that year wrecked the plant and caused at least a partial meltdown of its reactors. Seawater swamped the plant and caused cooling systems to fail, fuel rods melted and the roofs exploded to release radioactive material into the air as well as the land and ocean.
More than 100,000 people within 20km of the plant were evacuated as Japan’s first nuclear emergency was declared. Crops and water downwind were badly irradiated and, on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the disaster was rated as a seven out of seven and as the world’s second-worst nuclear incident behind Chernobyl in 1986.
Since 2011, the operators of the Fukushima plant have been pumping water on to reactor cores to cool them down. Hundreds of thousands of litres of water contaminated with tritium and the radioactive isotope carbon-14 will now be released each day, as there is no room left to contain it in tanks.
The Japanese government and scientists say the water is safe to release and it has been treated as much as it can be.
In all, more than 1 million tonnes will be discharged over the next 30 years.
There is general backing from the international science community that the procedure will have negligible harm on the Pacific environment. The International Atomic Energy Agency has also given it the thumbs-up, saying the plan complies with international standards.
Some Pacific nations, though, are less sanguine. In South Korea there have been vocal demonstrations outside the Japanese embassy.
And China — no doubt motivated by other geopolitical considerations — has banned the import of all Japanese seafood, labelling the discharge "extremely selfish and irresponsible" and accusing Japan of "passing an open wound on to the future generations".
While it is good to have the reassurance from scientists and the expert agencies that this action is not going to be harmful, Pacific nations have a right to be concerned when it comes to more unwanted nuclear by-products in our region. The water might be largely safe, but a Pacific Ocean without this water in it has to be healthier than one with it.
