What the RECA Delay Means July 2, 2024

Failure of the House to Act on RECA Puts Untold Thousands of Lives in Limbo

It has been a harsh and anxious year for the Downwinders, America’s victims of the Cold War whose lives were forever altered by the aboveground A-bomb testing in New Mexico and Nevada.

According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. exploded 215 bombs into the atmosphere between 1951 and 1962, sickening a known 54,000 people living “downwind” from the explosions. Collectively, more than $2.4 billion in benefits from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 1990 has been paid to these victims of America’s nuclear testing frenzy.

Those who qualified received lump sum, one-time individual payments of upwards of $75,000 for their civilian battle wounds: lung and breast cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma and other ailments.

Health Affects Spread Beyond the Areas Funded by the Government

Now in its 34th year, RECA was scheduled to expire on June 7 following a two-year extension from 2022. With every intention that RECA would be renewed, lawmakers in the downwind states pushed to expand the range of eligibility to include additional counties, including Mohave in Arizona and Clark County in Nevada, and states, including Alaska, Kentucky, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho and Tennessee.

Residents of Guam and the people who helped clean up the nuclear debris from the devastating explosions in the Marshall Islands are also included in the revised RECA.

The growing list of civilian casualties from the US nuclear build out includes not just those harmed by the direct fallout from the bombs but the radioactive isotopes from uranium mining, processing, refining — and disposal — that also define the  Atomic Age.

In March, the Senate voted 69-30 to reauthorize RECA and expand its reach to St. Louis as well, where investigative journalists with the Missouri Independent found that radioactive poisoning from a uranium processing facility had spread across a large swath of the city’s neighborhoods through contamination of Coldwater Creek.

To that end, the new RECA also includes expanded coverage for uranium miners who worked in the mines beyond the previous 1971 cutoff, a particular concern among the Navajo who spent years working in the uranium mines of Northern Arizona.

“The ever-present impacts of radiation has continued to put people at risk.”

Bipartisanship in the Senate Hits a Brick Wall in Congress

One positive from the Senate vote: the bipartisanship that brought Arizona’s Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and congressmen Ruben Gallegos and Greg Stanton in a rare policy alignment with Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). Nationally, the bipartisanship includes Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, who co-sponsored the amendment to expand RECA’s reach into St. Louis.

But no amount of party unification could help when RECA came to the House of Representatives, where Speaker Mike Johnson hemmed and hawed and avoided meeting delegations of lawmakers, victims and activists pleading for House action.

To no avail. The deadline for renewal came and went. With no clearly defined path ahead, the future of RECA remains in limbo. And victim compensation is likely to be put on hold until a solution is found. With one exception at this point: a Tuba City, AZ health clinic located on the Navajo Reservation plans to continue offering free patient screenings.

“The program has been around for a long time,” said a clinic coordinator. “Our patients are predominantly Navajo and Pueblo Laguna. Our average patient is a Navajo man, around 80-years-old.”

There Is No Good Compromise: Money is the Issue

“RECA has been with us for years and due to the ever-present impacts of radiation, people exposed to uranium mining and residual nuclear isotopes in contaminated ecosystems continue to be at risk for cancer and other illnesses,” warns Barbara Warren, PSR Arizona director.

The threat of radiation exposure is not a one-off threat, says Warren. “Nuclear fallout has drifted and become embedded in soil and trees, only to be released again by forest fires.”

Even worse, she adds, “the tragic destruction of Native American tribal homelands includes the past and present sites of uranium mining, where much of the land remains exposed to the environment.”

The issue is apparently the cost of the expanded RECA proposal, with spending estimated at upwards of $60 billion annually. In comparison, defense spending for 2025 is $833 billion.

PSR Arizona joins PSR chapters across the nation in condemning Speaker Johnson’s reluctance to deal with RECA head on. Martin Fleck, director of PSR’s Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program, says Johnson is kicking the can down the road with the aim of erasing all new spending proposals.

“We may have to make some compromises,” admits Fleck of actions going forward. “But the compromise that the RECA Working Group cannot accept would be a two-year extension” of the status quo.