A proposal to renew compensation for cancer victims who were exposed to radioactive material from the nation’s weapons development without expanding the program to Missouri and several other states amounted to betrayal, Missouri advocates and lawmakers said Tuesday.
Missouri members of Congress learned Tuesday night that U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson plans to extend the federal program for two years despite pressure from communities harmed by testing. nuclear bombs and waste to expand the program.
The announcement dealt a blow to advocates in St. Louis, the Navajo Nation and other communities who have been left out of the program, originally created in the 1990s. The existing program covers civilians in parts of Arizona, Utah and Nevada already uranium miners.
“I can’t believe how emotionally manipulated we felt that President Johnson would sit back and allow sick and dying community members to beg him for a meeting for months, and then spend (an) hour and a half with staff only to have them They will close the door. our faces!” Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, in a social media post.
Chapman was reacting to a post by U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, who said Johnson told Hawley’s office that he will pursue a bill that does not cover any of the states. Hawley said he will put up obstacles to prevent any such bill from passing the Senate without a fight.
“Total abandonment,” Hawley said. “No Missouri member can vote for this.”
Since last summer, Hawley has been pushing for an expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was initially passed in 1990 and provided compensation to uranium miners and residents who lived downwind of nuclear sites. testing of nuclear bombs in certain states.
Hawley’s legislation, which has passed the U.S. Senate twice, would expand the program to downwinders in the remaining parts of Arizona, Utah and Nevada and provide coverage to downwinders in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam. It would also expand coverage to those exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky.
The existing RECA program expires June 10, and advocates and lawmakers in states hoping to participate in the program have been urging Congress to renew and expand it.
U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican from suburban St. Louis, said on social media that a RECA bill without Missouri “is dead on arrival.”
“I will continue to fight for the expansion of RECA so that Missourians receive the justice they deserve,” he said. “The House can and should accept the version passed by the Senate.”
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, also wrote on social media that “not expanding RECA is not a viable option.”
“Next week, President Johnson plans to rip off Missourians and thousands of others suffering from the radioactive waste the federal government dumps in our backyards,” Bush said.
Parts of the St. Louis area have been contaminated for 75 years with radioactive waste left over from the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a breakthrough in the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the bomb.
After the war, waste from uranium refining efforts was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties and dumped near Coldwater Creek and in a quarry in Weldon Spring, contaminating surface and groundwater. The remaining waste was dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today.
Generations of St. Louis-area families lived in homes near contaminated sites without notice from the federal government. A study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that exposure to the creek raised residents’ cancer risk. Residents of nearby communities suffer higher than normal rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancer, and leukemia. Childhood cancers of the brain and nervous system are also higher.
Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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