Advocates urge vote on nuclear victim compensation bill

WASHINGTON — Activists for victims of the nation’s nuclear development and testing programs descended on Washington this week in hopes of pushing forward legislation to renew and expand a compensation fund that remains stalled in the House over cost concerns.

Lawmakers and advocates urged Speaker Mike Johnson to hold a vote on a Senate-passed bill from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., contending that the bill would easily pass if brought to the floor.

But deep concerns remain in the House about whether the bill would be able to get the majority of House Republicans to back it. In the Senate, 29 of the chamber’s 49 Republicans voted against, and sources say the potential cost is a major hurdle in the House.

Hawley’s bill would reauthorize and update the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides financial compensation and medical screening to those downwind of nuclear testing, as well as those exposed and sickened through uranium mining and exposure to waste. The previous two-year reauthorization expired in June.

It would expand claims to a greater number of “downwinders,” and open the fund to residents of Guam and veterans who handled waste in the Marshall Islands. It would also expand eligibility to certain areas in Alaska, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee where uranium was refined and disposed of in connection with the Manhattan Project.

“What’s happened since 1990 is we found that the government’s nuclear program was broader than we thought,” Hawley said at a press conference on Tuesday. “We found that radiation was broader than we thought and we learned that communities that should have been included the first time never were.”

Uranium processed in St. Louis was used in the first atomic bombs, and issues surrounding nuclear waste have continued to plague certain areas of that region, even requiring the closure of an elementary school in 2022 due to contaminated soil.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2023 that the expanded compensation fund would cost the government $147.1 billion over 10 years. However, advocates said that figure could be reduced to $50 billion by limiting the window in which people would be eligible for benefits and eliminating compensation for some illnesses.

“If you don’t like the price then come to us,” said Dawn Chapman, founder of Just Moms STL, a community group focused on the issue. “We could walk alongside you for five minutes and haggle about the price.”

In May, the House scrapped a vote on a separate bill from Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, that would extend RECA for another two years, after supporters of Hawley’s bill raised objections.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M., said that the expansion of the program offered through Hawley’s bill is necessary to recognize the patriotism of Native American miners and their families.

“They came to work for a program which the United States deemed essential for national security,” Leger Fernández said. “You gave your lives, you gave your bodies, you gave your families to the United States’ security.”

Leger Fernández brought Carol Etcitty-Roger to the podium with her to speak. Etcitty-Roger, a member of the Navajo Nation, said she noticed something gold-colored fall off her father’s mining uniform when she helped her mother wash it as a child. She later came to understand this was yellowcake uranium.

She is currently being treated for cancer, as have multiple members of her family.

Another visitor to the Capitol, Kathleen Tsosie, is originally from Cove, Ariz., which was surrounded by uranium mines that operated until 1986. She said few men in her community have survived to old age because of illnesses associated with exposure, and that she recently finished radiation treatment for a recurrence of breast cancer.

“I was hoping that the bill would have been passed last year,” Tsosie said. “It would have helped me with home care while I was going through my surgeries and with pain and suffering.”