Missouri residents affected by radiation exposure are urging Congress to extend benefits. • Ohio Capital Journal

WASHINGTON – A fund to compensate Americans sickened by exposure to atomic bomb tests, uranium mining and radioactive waste is set to expire in less than 20 days, and activists and lawmakers are scrambling to keep the fund active and open to additional victims .

A bill to reauthorize and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, often shortened to RECA, passed the U.S. Senate in early March on a bipartisan vote of 69-30, but the House has yet to vote on it.

Critics cite the high costs, but bipartisan lawmakers and activists supporting the bill say victims have already paid the price through medical bills and lost loved ones, and that it is ultimately wrong for the government to correct this.

The legislation approved by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley aims to extend the program for six years and expand eligibility to several new locations, including his state of Missouri, where residents have witnessed numerous rare similar incidents over decades cancers among neighbors in and around St. Louis.

Chemical plants in downtown St. Louis and Weldon Spring, Missouri, processed uranium during the nation’s World War II to build the first atomic bomb. Radioactive waste from the power stations was stored and dumped in the area.

States Newsroom’s Missouri Independent, in collaboration with the Associated Press and MuckRock, collected and searched thousands of government documents showing that the government downplayed and ignored the dangers of the radioactive waste.

‘The government did this’

Tammy Tesson Puhlmann, 63, who lived for decades in Florissant, Missouri, sat in the Russell Senate Office Building on Wednesday with photos of her son Drew — first as a baby born with a rare blood disorder, and then as a skinny 30-year-old. year-old man, just a week before he died of cancer.

“If I can prevent one mother from going through something like this, I would do anything,” she said through tears. “It’s the most unbearable feeling in the world to know that you can’t do anything for your child, and to know that the government did this.”

Puhlmann was one of 10 eastern Missouri residents and state representatives who met Wednesday with 10 lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise; U.S. Representatives Ann Wagner and Blaine Luetkemeyer, both Republicans from Missouri; and the GOP Sens. State’s Eric Schmitt and Hawley.

Tricia Byrnes and Richard West of Missouri, both Republicans representing districts just outside St. Louis, flipped through maps and photos documenting the contaminated sites, including where a uranium processing plant and byproduct dump were located next to Francis Howell High School . , where Byrnes was present.

“Look how close it was to all the infections. That high school still exists,” Byrnes said, pointing to a map.

To Byrnes’ left sat Kristin Denbow, a 1988 Francis Howell graduate who has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer in the bone marrow.

“We have memories of men in full suits walking around the grounds of our high school while we were there,” Denbow said.

‘This has been our life’

Three generations of the Susie Gaffney family lived in the St. Louis suburbs near Coldwater Creek, unaware that radioactive waste moved from the uranium plant downtown was leaking into the water.

Susie’s husband, Jim, grew up in a house next to the creek and not far from Jana Elementary School, which closed in 2023 due to radioactive contamination.

“Jim grew up playing in the creek, everyone did that. Everyone who tells the creek played stories (there). It was great, it wasn’t deep. Children fished, they made mudslides. It was a great place to live,” Gaffney said.

Jim, whose mother died of colon cancer after being diagnosed when she was 40, was diagnosed with lymphoma at the age of 24.

When Susie and Jim’s son Joey was a baby, they moved to a nearby subdivision called Wedgewood, a few miles up the creek. Joey also played in the water as a child.

Joey was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of 18 and eventually underwent a thyroidectomy. Gaffney, now 66, remembers the doctors telling her, “This child is Chernobyl.”

“’This is what happened at Chernobyl. He has metastatic thyroid cancer. This is what happened there. He had to be exposed to radiation’ and naively I said, ‘Well, where?’ And so this has been our life,” she said.

Joey is now 45. Jim, 68, was also diagnosed with bladder cancer and now lives with myelodysplastic syndrome, Gaffney said.

“He lives on blood transfusions,” she said, pointing to a photo of him on a packet of papers she handed out to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Below Jim’s photo was a map of the region with red dots for each cancer case.

“I just want people to tunnel in,” Gaffney said. “Pretend you’re on Google Earth, zoom all the way down, step on that front door and imagine our lifespan with health care, with depression, with anxiety and fear. Our quality of life has certainly been affected, all of us.”

Debate on Capitol Hill

The government’s soon-to-expire compensation program pays one-time payments of $75,000 to those who developed certain diseases after working on U.S. nuclear tests before 1963. It will pay $50,000 to those who lived in certain counties downwind of the test explosion sites between January 1951 and October 1958. and the month of July in 1962, in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Uranium industry workers who worked in 11 states from 1942 to 1971 and subsequently developed qualifying diseases are eligible for $100,000.

Hawley’s bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, would also extend to all of Arizona, Nevada and Utah, as well as include leeward and affected areas in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam. In addition, one-time compensation amounts for victims or surviving family members would increase to $100,000.

If passed, the legislation would reach areas such as zip codes in Alaska, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, where communities have been affected by radioactive waste dumping, uranium processing and other related activities surrounding the tests.

The bill’s estimated cost of $50 billion to $60 billion has drawn criticism. Hawley’s office confirmed the estimate. There is no official budget score.

On Thursday, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah asked for unanimous consent in the Senate for his proposed “clean extension” of the program, as it exists for another two years — covering only those affected in areas of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Lee cited the risk of “increasing the budget deficit by at least $60 billion” and questioned whether there is enough data to support contagion in the additional areas in Hawley’s bill.

“You see, the House of Representatives has thus far declined to take up and pass Senator Hawley’s previous bill, raising some concerns and raising some of the concerns that I just reiterated,” said the Utah Republican.

Hawley objected and Luján seconded the objection.

“Study after study has shown the vastness of nuclear radiation. Here is a study from 1997, from 2005, another from 2005 and from 2023, all showing that nuclear radiation is well outside the contours of the original RECA bill that passed in 1990,” Hawley said. “Yet my friend from Utah wants to keep doing the same old thing and leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans out in the cold. I don’t agree with it.”

Lee responded, saying he understood Hawley and Luján’s “passionate pleas.” He offered an updated version that includes Missouri and New Mexico but leaves out other states and Guam. His office cites an unofficial budget figure of $30 billion.

“There are other states in (Hawley’s) legislation pending in the House of Representatives that are dealing with legislation in the Marshall Islands, Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Alaska and perhaps one or two other jurisdictions. Those states’ claims are not on equal footing,” Lee said.

“That’s where a lot of the — not all, but a lot of the costs are being incurred and where a lot of concerns are being raised in the House of Representatives that are hindering its rapid passage, which could lead to it not being able to be passed at all ,” he continued.

Hawley again objected, saying he “will not be a party to any attempt at an interim measure, a stopgap bill, or an attempt to sweep this under the rug.”

A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, told States Newsroom on May 15 that “the Speaker understands and appreciates Senator Hawley’s position and is working closely with interested Members and stakeholders to identify a path forward to be mapped out for the House.”

RECA was founded in 1990.

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 scientists detonated the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb before the US dropped weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan , let fall. at the end of the Second World War.

Since June 2022, the government has approved more than 36,000 RECA claims for more than $2.3 billion in benefits.

Unless the fund is expanded, claims must be stamped no later than June 10, 2024, according to the Justice Department, which administers the payouts.