Congress pulls funding

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In summer, New Mexicans who have been pushing for decades for compensation from the federal government for radiation exposure had reason for optimism. On Wednesday, their cause faced a new setback.

Those who were exposed to radiation after the nuclear test at the Trinity Test site and during years of uranium mining in northern New Mexico and the Navajo Nation have been pushing for an expansion to an already existing federal program, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. It compensates people exposed to atomic radiation in Arizona, Utah and Nevada and uranium mine workers who were in mines before 1971.

In July, the proposed expansion passed the Senate with a supermajority. But on Wednesday, it was pulled out of the National Defense Authorization Act in the House.

For Tina Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, the fight is not over. Established in 1990, the compensation program is set to end in June 2024, but she feels certain that there will be movement to extend the program.

“Maybe the only thing that matches the pain and suffering and sacrifice of the people of New Mexico and other parts of the American West and Guam is our conviction on this,” Cordova said. “We will never give up.

“We will never give up and it is shockingly immoral. The way Congress has handled this, it’s shockingly immoral. You know, in this country of ours, this democracy we live in, where there’s law and order and rules and you follow those— it’s not acceptable for someone to go about doing something very

reckless, harming somebody else and walking away and saying, ‘I don’t have the money to take care of it.’”

Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., introduced the amendment in the Senate along with Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mike Crapo of Idaho. Luján said in a statement that the fight for radiation compensation doesn’t end here.

“The NDAA fails to provide justice for New Mexicans who sacrificed for our national security,” Luján said. “Generations of New Mexicans and their families have gotten sick and died from the radiation exposure and the lasting impacts of the Trinity Test. For New Mexico to have been ground zero for the first nuclear weapon — and left out of the original RECA program — is an injustice.”

Hawley pledged to vote against the NDAA if the expansion is not included in the final bill. Production of uranium in Missouri contaminated the Coldwater Creek.

“At the last minute and behind closed doors, Republican leadership stripped critical compensation for downwinders and uranium workers from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It is absolutely outrageous,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M., said in a statement. Leger Fernández introduced the expansion in the House.

RECA has paid out $2.6 billion, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice. The proposed expansion would have cost an estimated $143 billion over 10

years, according to the nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the U.S. nuclear forces will cost $756 billion from 2023 to 2032.

The proposed expansion would have added conditions like renal failure, expanded compensation to downwinders in other states including New Mexico, and expanded compensation to uranium mine workers who were in mines from 1972 to 1990.

Uranium mines

Phil Harrison of the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee watched his father die from lung cancer at 43, after working 21 years in uranium mines. Harrison grew up in Cove, Arizona, where there was uranium mining in the 1950s and 1960s. He has been advocating for uranium miners for 45 years, and he helped write the amendment that would have expanded RECA.

“They have taken advantage of my people, when they were uneducated, they couldn’t read and write, and they were given a shovel with no warning,” he said. “The families lived among the mining camps. They were exposed to the downwind, or the piles of uranium. People used water from the mine for their consumption.”

His younger brother died as an infant after drinking powdered milk mixed with mine water. Harrison suffered kidney failure himself — which he attributes to the four months he worked in a uranium mine.

In his work as an advocate for former uranium mine workers, Harrison said he’s seen many post-1971 uranium miners, who were not eligible for compensation under the current version of RECA, die from COVID-19.

“We have a lot of people that are on oxygen, and a lot of people have died, and this is something that Congress should realize, that they should understand that they poison our people. They poison our land. A lot of these aquifers are contaminated. People used to farm and they don’t farm anymore because of the continuing contamination of uranium that comes off the mountains,” Harrison said.

Harrison is a U.S. Air Force veteran and knew many veterans who worked in the uranium mines to support their families.

“They did a double duty. They didn’t get no medals, but they got lung cancer,” Harrison said.

Generations of cancer

Cordova is the fourth of five generations in her family to have cancer. Her great-grandfathers both lived in the Tularosa area at the time of the Trinity Test, and both died within 10 years of the test with diagnoses of stomach cancer.

“They were given morphine They were sent home to die and in a very short period of time, they had,” Cordova said. “And this was at a time when no one had ever heard the word ‘cancer’ in our communities.”

Both of her grandmothers had cancer, and her father — who was 4 at the time of the Trinity Test living 45 miles away from the test site — died from cancer after tumors developed in his mouth. He never smoked, didn’t use chewing tobacco, and rarely drank, she said.

Cordova got thyroid cancer when she was 39, and her niece got thyroid cancer at 23.

Cordova has seen her own family story reflected by downwinders in other states, like a woman in Utah who has thyroid cancer and a niece with thyroid cancer.

“I wish I could say my family’s unique,” Cordova said. “We have documented hundreds and hundreds of families across the state of New Mexico who are exhibiting four and five generations of cancer. We have alarming cancer rates, and this isn’t going to go away. This is not going away. And guess what? We know it contributes greatly to the poverty we see in our state. It’s no coincidence that New Mexico is one of the states that has the highest medical debt in the country.”

In 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported that approximately 18% of New Mexicans had medical debt, averaging $2,692, for a total of $881 million in medical debt across the state.