Pobel and Viel found that children who had spent time at local beaches more than once a month were almost three times more likely than the controls to develop leukemia. They also found an increased risk when mothers went regularly to these beaches during pregnancy. A similarly increased risk to children was shown from eating local fish and shellfish, although mothers' eating habits appeared to pose no increased risk to their children. Parents' occupational exposure (not just to radiation, but also to chemicals and wood dust) or exposure to radiation did not seem to significantly influence the risk of leukemia in their children. They found some evidence of increased risk from exposure to radon in the home.

They concluded that their study shows some convincing evidence for a causal role for environmental radiation exposure, and that study into environmental pathways particularly on marine ecosystems is warranted. In fact, monitoring in June 1997 of the area around the drainage pipe from the reprocessing plant by Greenpeace, followed by an independent analysis on samples conducted by the Department of Labor, Health and Social Service of the Federal State of Hamburg (Germany) showed levels of tritium of up to 160 million becquerels per liter and sediments that could be classified as "waste containing nuclear fuel." In July, French Environmental Minister Dominique Voynet called an indefinite ban on fishing and bathing near the La Hague facility.

Pobel and Viel's study was the first case-control study (where an exposed population was compared to a non-exposed population) to be conducted in France (few studies on the effects of radiation on health have been conducted at all in France, and most of these have been the less sophisticated studies which compare mortality rates between different geographical areas.) However, in Britain there has been a series of studies conducted since in 1983, with the identification of what came to be known as the "Seascale cluster." A ten-fold increase in childhood leukemia rate compared to the national average was found in the village of Seascale, near the Sellafield reprocessing facility. The government commissioned a study to estimate the probable radiation doses to children in Seascale from the Sellafield discharges. It was found that the probable doses were too low to have caused the excess leukemias, but there is a possibility that this study was flawed. One of the follow-up studies was conducted in 1990 by Martin Gardner and others, which showed a link between radiation doses received by fathers before conception, and leukemia in children. There has been much controversy over this finding, because it was the first study to correlate fathers' exposure to radiation with childhood leukemia.

Following discovery of the Seascale cluster, a number of studies were conducted around other nuclear facilities. In 1989 Paula Cook-Mozaffari and others found a slight, but significant increase in leukemia in people under the age of 25 in the areas around 15 nuclear facilities in England and Wales. Most significant of these was the increase of leukemia around nuclear weapons plants at Aldermaston and Burghfield, which are located near eachother, because the area around these plants is more densely populated. It is difficult to explain in terms of official estimates of environmental exposure to radioactivity, as the estimated doses to this population do not match the increase in leukemia. There has been no independent evaluation of radioactive releases and dose estimates in other countries as most documents are still secret. Further, our work in the US has shown that official dose estimates from weapons plants are often wrong and seriously understate public exposure.