France has used nuclear power for three decades and is the most nuclear-reliant country in the world, with 75 percent of its electricity produced by 58 reactors.
The study, conducted by the French health research body INSERM, found that between 2002 and 2007, 14 children under the age of 15 living in a 5-kilometre radius of France’s 19 nuclear power plants had been diagnosed with leukemia.
This is double the rate of the rest of the country, where a total of 2,753 cases were diagnosed in the same period.
“This is a result which has been checked thoroughly and which is statistically significant,” said Dominique Laurier, head of the epidemiology research laboratory at France’s nuclear safety research body (IRSN).