Environmental Project
Lawmakers, community members say RECA expansion is needed to help the ‘unknowing, unwilling, uncompensated victims of the Cold War’
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As the years have passed and people have died of cancer, Navajo Nation communities impacted by uranium mining have lost hope that they will someday receive compensation for the medical conditions resulting from exposure to radioactivity, Phil Harrison said during a press conference on Wednesday. “We are here in Washington to tell America how freedom was established,” Harrison, a former miner and a member of the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee, said. People like Harrison who were exposed to radiation as a result of uranium mining as well as the downwinders who were exposed to radiation after the Trinity nuclear detonation in areas like New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin are closer to receiving compensation than ever before after the U.S. Senate approved an expansion to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act earlier this year as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.
Now members of the U.S. House of Representatives including Teresa Leger Fernández, a Democrat from New Mexico and James Moylan, a Republican non-voting member who represents Guam, are pushing to have that body of Congress approve the expansion. U.S. Senators Ben Ray Luján, D-New Mexico, and Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, hosted a press conference on Wednesday and were joined by their colleagues Leger Fernández, Moylan and Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, as well as various people from communities impacted by the radiation exposure. Many of the people who attended, including Harrison, wore yellow shirts that read: “We are the unknowing, unwilling, uncompensated victims of the Cold War.”
‘We’re dealing with death’
Harrison said the miners were largely uneducated and couldn’t read and write.