As “Oppenheimer” puts spotlight on nuclear tests, Hawley pushes to expand exposure benefits

Tina Cordova grew up in a small town close to where the U.S. government detonated the first nuclear bomb in the desert of New Mexico.

Her family has lived in New Mexico for six generations and she’s collected the stories of people who were as close to 12 miles away from where they tested the bomb.

They didn’t have running water, they collected the rain for cooking and bathing. They didn’t have electricity or grocery stores and ate food produced on their land. The government didn’t warn them before the first nuclear test. Ash fell from the sky and contaminated their water supply and their food.

Cordova, who is in her 60s, is the fourth generation in her family to have thyroid cancer. When she was diagnosed at 39, the doctors asked when she was exposed to radiation. Her 23-year-old niece was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She’s the fifth generation.

“This is our history,” Cordova said Tuesday, at a press conference out side of the Capitol. “This is the legacy of the nuclear development and testing that took place in our country during the Cold War and before. And it is time for justice.”

Cordova, the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, is among a group of advocates pushing to expand a 1990 law called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides a one-time payment for people who have certain diseases — like thyroid cancer — either because they were downwind of nuclear tests or because they worked in uranium mines helping to create the bombs.

But the original act only covers some areas — it doesn’t cover people who were downwind of the first bomb tested in New Mexico. It doesn’t include the people who were exposed to radioactive material used to make nuclear bombs for the Manhattan Project in St. Louis County in the 1940s, where nuclear waste spilled into Coldwater Creek.

But now, the activists are close to seeing the change. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican spurred by evidence of contamination at Jana Elementary School in St. Louis County, teamed up with Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, a New Mexico Democrat who has long pushed for expansion of the original act.

The two were able to get an amendment into the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act — the bill that funds the country’s military — with the support of 61 senators.

“Listen, this is a basic principle,” Hawley said. “If a government is going to create a disaster the government should clean it up. If the government is going to expose its own citizens, to radioactive material, radioactive waste, radioactive contamination for decades, the government ought to pay the bills of the men and women who had gotten sick because of it.”

Advocates are hopeful that the legislation will pass, especially amid new attention to the first nuclear test in the aftermath of the hit Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer,” about the scientist, Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project.

Both the House and Senate have passed different versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, which means the two chambers need to negotiate over the details. Lawmakers were appointed to a conference committee to iron out the deal this week.

Hawley and Lujan pushed to expand the benefits to people in Missouri, near the Coldwater Creek site, and to people in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah who were downwind from nuclear testing. It also expands benefits to some people who mined uranium until 1990. It increases the amount people

The senators will have to convince the members serving on the conference committee to keep the language in the bill.

Dawn Chapman, a Missourian who founded Just Moms St. Louis, has pushed for Missourians to be eligible for benefits. She said the Senate vote “moved mountains” and that she had faith the House would get on board too.

“We’re not asking for a handout,” Chapman said. “We’re asking for the extension of a program that’s already in existence.”