13. Conclusion

Fallout from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the Chernobyl accident has created a radiological background linked to the presence, in the environment, of artificial radionuclides that were not previously present or were present in lesser quantities (as in the case of tritium and carbon 14, which also have a natural origin).

Due to high mass and volume activities in the various components of the environment, the numerous radionuclides that made up this background noise at the height of the fallout (in the early 1960s and in 1986) induced exposures in the French population that were not negligible compared to those resulting from natural radiation sources; as a reminder, the latter are estimated, on average for the French population as a whole, at 300 µSv.year ^-1 from exposure to cosmic radiation, 550 µSv.year...