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People Harmed by Radiation Exposure Can Forget About Any Federal Compensation

Speaker Mike Johnson killed a proposal to provide benefits to victims of America’s nuclear program.

Mother Jones Katherine Hapgood, August 21, 2024

This story is a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative reporting news organization.

It wasn’t a difficult choice for Linda Evers, after graduating high school in 1976, to take a job crushing dirt for the Kerr McGee uranium mill, just north of her hometown Grants, New Mexico. Most gigs in town paid $1.75 an hour. This one offered $9 an hour.

She spent seven years working in New Mexico’s uranium mines and mills, driving a truck and loading the ore crusher for much of the late 1970s and early ’80s, including through her pregnancies with each of her children. “When I told them I was pregnant,” Evers, now 66, recalled, “they told me it was okay, I could work until my belly wouldn’t let me reach the conveyor belts anymore.”

Both children were born with health defects—her son with a muscle wrapped around the bottom of his stomach and her daughter without hips. Today, Evers herself suffers from scarring lungs, a degenerative bone and joint disease, and multiple skin rashes. All of which doctors have attributed to radiation exposure.

“We never learned about uranium exposure or any of that,” said Evers, who recalled safety training that consisted primarily of standard first aid such as treating burns and broken bones. Only decades later Evers learned of the health risks she’d incurred. “They were killing us. And they knew they were killing us.”

American workers have labored in uranium mines since the early 1900s, with the majority of mining occurring from the 1950s through the end of the Cold War, when tens of thousands of workers produced hundreds of millions of pounds of uranium. The government has since acknowledged that, despite being at least partially aware of the health risks, decades of miners like Evers were allowed to labor in dangerous conditions.

“Anything that got in the way of producing more nuclear weapons, testing more nuclear weapons, anything that made that more expensive was to be avoided if at all possible,” said Stephen Schwartz, senior fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, creating a process by which some of those harmed as a result of the expansion of the US nuclear program could receive financial and medical benefits. “The bill in a small way will make up for the mistakes made in the early days of the uranium mines,” Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said during a public hearing in March 1990. More than 500 members of the Navajo Nation who either themselves worked in or had loved ones who worked in uranium mines attended, according to an account in the Arizona Daily Sun. “We could never replace the ones that died or those who are ill,” he continued. “But this is a giant step.”

In the three and a half decades since, 41,977 Americans have received about $2.7 billion—roughly $62,000 per—for health impacts caused prior to 1971 when the US government stopped being the sole domestic purchaser of uranium.

Advocates across the country have long argued that such benefits are available to far too few people given that the US continued to operate uranium mines and employ miners for years after 1971 and that medical advances have provided new insight into the adverse health effects for many others—such as those who lived downwind of test sites or in homes constructed near or on top of nuclear waste.

“That was a problem—this person got compensated, this one didn’t,” said Doug Brugge, an expert in health epidemiology related to uranium mining. “For people who are not government bureaucrats or academic intellectuals and parsing numbers, it just felt really unfair.”

Arlene Juanico and her husband Lawrence both worked as post-71 uranium miners, making them among those ineligible for RECA benefits under the original legislation. She remembers being hired within a week of having applied, given a hard hat, leather gloves, and ear plugs but never warned about the danger of radiation. Today their home in Paguate, New Mexico, sits in the shadow of Jackpile uranium mine, an EPA Superfund site. The Juanicos say that they wake each morning to a strong, rotting scent wafting off of the vacated mine. “Lawrence and I never considered being exposed until 2019,” she said. “We breathed that air 24 hours a day.”

Within the last year, Lawrence has been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, the same disease his father and uncle—who worked the same mines—died from. Arlene fears she’ll be next.

With RECA benefits scheduled to expire earlier this year, a bipartisan set of lawmakers proposed a significant expansion of the program which, among other things, would have extended the program until 2030 and increased the compensation amount and eligible circumstances to now include people in about a dozen states, including people like Evers and the Juanicos………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

It’s a similar story in Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, where communities that sit downwind of former nuclear testing sites have been ravaged by cancers and other diseases yet excluded from RECA benefits for decades.

Tina Cordova has lost count of all the relatives who have died from various cancers and chronic illnesses in the past several decades. She herself has been in remission from thyroid cancer for 26 years and is the fourth generation of five in her family to have had cancer over the past century. At least a seventh-generation New Mexican, Cordova’s hometown of Tularosa sits about 45 miles downwind from where the Trinity atomic bomb was detonated in 1945.

“It’s affected everybody in my family one way or the other,” said Cordova, 64, who has spent years collecting roughly 1,200 testimonials and health surveys from New Mexico families who believe they have suffered radiation exposure. “We just trudge through this and we wonder who’s going to be next.”

In her years traveling around the state to advocate for those suffering from radiation exposure, Cordova has heard the same story on repeat. First, people get sick from radiation exposure and have to quit their jobs. When they lose their health insurance, they have trouble keeping up with their medical bills and the travel required for treatment. At some point, they face a choice: either leave their families with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt, or go home to die.

Under the proposed RECA expansion, residents downwind of the Trinity test site would be able to receive up to $100,000 for medical bills or to travel for treatments, as well as access to additional medical benefits. In the meantime, they aren’t eligible.

“We’ve been irreparably harmed and they recklessly did it. And now when we’re trying to have them atone for this, for them to say it’s going to cost too much is absolutely unacceptable,” Cordova said. “It speaks to how much they had to dehumanize us to do this. They didn’t treat us like human beings, they treated us like collateral damage.” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/people-harmed-by-radiation-exposure-can-forget-about-any-federal-compensation/

August 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES, USA | Leave a comment