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Advocates are urging the U.S. House of Representatives to take swift action on compensation for nuclear test victims. • Colorado Newsline

Posted on by Vaseline

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers and advocates rallied outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, urging House lawmakers to expand a fund for victims of U.S. nuclear testing that is set to expire in less than a month.

But critics say the program is too expensive and should be phased out, and it’s not clear whether the House will take action before the looming deadline.

New Mexico Democrats Sen. Ben Ray Luján and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez and Guam Republican House Rep. James Moylan, among others, called on House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana to bring up the legislation to take.

“We stand with community members from across the United States, ranging from New Mexico, where they detonated the very first atomic bomb, to Guam, Missouri, Navajo, Utah, Colorado and people in Texas,” Fernandez said. “Communities that share a common bond of hardship, death and disease, created by the national program to build and test nuclear weapons.”

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An estimated 14% of the uranium oxide, commonly known as “goldencake,” produced for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission as part of the Manhattan Project and during the Cold War came from mines on the Colorado Plateau in the Four Corners region. And research has shown that parts of southern and western Colorado were significantly affected by radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions at the Trinity Test Site in July 1945 and the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s.

Legislation to expand and expand the nuclear test victims fund already passed the Senate in early March on a bipartisan vote of 69-30.

Advocates and survivors have long said they were not warned before the nuclear tests and were forgotten in the decades that followed as the fallout and waste affected their families.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Fund, often abbreviated to RECA, was established in 1990 and pays one-time amounts to those who developed certain diseases after working on U.S. nuclear tests before 1963, or who worked in counties downwind of the sites of test explosions between January 1951 and 1951 lived. October 1958 and July 1962 in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Uranium industry workers who worked in eleven states, including Colorado, from 1942 to 1971 and subsequently developed qualifying diseases are also eligible.

The US conducted more than a thousand nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1992 – the first at the Trinity Test Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the US tested the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project before dropping the weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. the end of the Second World War.

As of June 2022, the Department of Justice has approved more than 36,000 RECA claims for more than $2.3 billion in benefits.

Unless the Radiation Exposure Compensation Fund is extended, claims must be postmarked by June 10, 2024, according to the Department of Justice.

‘Unknowing, unwilling, uncompensated victims’

A small crowd of activists wore “Save RECA” buttons and matching yellow T-shirts with the message “We are the ignorant, unwilling, uncompensated victims of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.”

Radius: The Legacy of America’s Nuclear Weapon Testing Program from States Newsroom and MuckRock

A sign on the small lectern read: “Speaker Johnson Pass RECA Before We Die.”

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of St. Louis, Missouri-based Just Moms STL, told the crowd that she and advocates had been in lawmakers’ offices demanding that RECA be included in the House of Representatives.

“Speaker Johnson’s staff met with two community groups this morning, one of which is ours. We met in his office for an hour and a half,” she said.

Under the Senate-passed bill, championed by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, the fund would extend the program for six years and expand eligibility in several new locations, as well as add qualifying diseases.

As written and if approved, the fund would reach areas, including zip codes in Alaska, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, where communities were affected by radioactive waste dumping, uranium processing and other related activities surrounding the tests.

The bill would also expand leeward areas to include Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam and increase one-time compensation amounts for victims or survivors to $100,000, from $50,000 to $75,000.

Hawley was unable to attend the news conference because of a last-minute conflict, his fellow lawmakers said. But in a statement on Thursday, X

In a statement to States Newsroom, a spokesperson for Johnson said Wednesday that “the Speaker understands and appreciates Senator Hawley’s position and is working closely with interested members and stakeholders to chart a path forward for the House of Representatives.”

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) talks to reporters after a vote on the infrastructure bill at the U.S. Capitol on August 4, 2021 in Washington, DC (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Worried about costs

Critics say the expansion would simply be too expensive.

An earlier version of the expansion, which received 61 votes in the Senate, was included in last year’s massive annual defense bill, but lawmakers ultimately removed it from the package.

The cost of the expansion is expected to be $150 billion, according to an analysis by the watchdog group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Hawley cut costs in his revised legislation, which garnered bipartisan support in the Senate in March. The new price tag dropped to an estimated cost of $50 to $60 billion over ten years after Hawley removed some qualifying diseases, shortened the scope of medical benefits and shortened the extension from 19 years to six years, the CRFB said.

Still, critics worry that the funds will be classified as automatic mandatory spending, meaning the funding cannot be adjusted from year to year by lawmakers like discretionary spending.

“Compensation may well be justified for individuals harmed by the government’s nuclear activities, but the legislation’s substantial impact on deficits is concerning and unnecessary,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote in March. The organization also pointed out that the costs will not be offset by other federal cuts.

“There is no reason why this known, long-term problem should not be addressed with careful consideration of both policy design and offsetting revenue increases or expenditure reductions,” the organization’s statement continued.