New Mexico delegation, radiation victims renew call for compensation

Yahoo

10-06-2025

Tina Cordova, a founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, protests at the Trinity site on Oct. 21, 2023. (Danielle Prokop)
In the one year since the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expired, New Mexico survivors of federal nuclear testing programs said they have continued to watch family members and friends die.
The RECA legislation, passed in 1990, compensated people who developed cancers or other illnesses as a result of radiation exposure from the United States' atomic programs. New Mexico's Trinity test downwinders and uranium miners who worked in the industry after RECA's coverage period (post-1971) have been notably excluded. New Mexico's congressional delegation have made numerous attempts to expand and extend the bill, with the U.S. Senate passing the bill to do so twice last year. But the bill never made it to the U.S. House floor for a vote, and expired on June 10, 2024.
Time's run out for the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act
Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which includes victims and descendants downwind from the 1945 Trinity Test, told attendees during a Tuesday news conference marking the RECA-expiration anniversary, two of her cousins have died in the last year, one 'after battling brain cancer for many, many years.' Her youngest brother, Cordova noted, also had also been diagnosed with kidney cancer and is fighting the disease alongside his daughter, who also has cancer.
'My family has five generations of cancer now,' said Cordova, herself a cancer survivor, whose battle for justice serves as the centerpiece for Lois Lipman's award-winning documentary First We Bombed New Mexico. 'My family is not unique. We've documented thousands of families like mine exhibiting four and five generations of cancer. That's the face of the legacy that we've been left to deal with.'
Loretta Anderson (Pueblo of Laguna), a patient advocate and co- founder of the Southwest Uranium Miners Coalition Post-71, said she works with 1,000 uranium miners and their families and, in the year since RECA expired, counts 10 who have died.
'They died with no compensation, no apology from the government, and many of them were part of our coalition,' Anderson said. 'We mourn, we hurt, we cry, we suffer. Many of our people are sick. Our young are now being diagnosed with cancer and other horrific diseases. We're losing our young. We're losing our future.'
We're losing our young. We're losing our future.
– Loretta Anderson, Pueblo of Laguna and Southwest Uranium Miners Coalition Post-71
Congress 'is responsible for those deaths,' Democratic U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, who represents the state's 3rd Congressional District, said during the call, in which she exhorted her Republican colleagues in the U.S. House 'to stand up for their constituents. 'Congress has failed its moral obligation…Speaker [Mike] Johnson needs to let us vote.'
Nuclear survivors have lobbied for decades for inclusion in RECA. The current push comes amid the Trump administration's push for renewed uranium mining in New Mexico and elsewhere, which both Cordova and Anderson oppose.
'Our government has not cleaned up the mess they made in the beginning,' Cordova said. 'They have not done anything to address the first round of uranium mining. And as it relates to downwinders, this is the 80th anniversary since Trinity. We have no faith in the government coming back to take care of the mess they made, and they want us to support new mining? Personally, we cannot do that.'
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Anderson noted that she lives 11 miles from the former Jackpile-Paguate uranium mine, now a Superfund site.
'And so, we're going to fight,' any new mines, she said. 'We need to compensate, take care of the lands that they destroyed…before any mining is done, because people are sick, people are suffering… I know many of our people here on the reservations and surrounding communities do not support uranium mining here ever again.'
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) noted that the Trump administration's push for more uranium mining should serve as yet another reason to support RECA.
'The fundamental issue here is like,' let's own up to what we did as a as a government,'' Heinrich said. 'That's just the right and moral thing to do…you can't expect communities to embrace new mining if you haven't fixed the problems that you created 50, 60 years ago.'
As for reintroducing RECA and pushing it through Congress, Leger Fernández said she has spoken directly with Johnson, whose concerns, she said, had more to do with the cost than the concept of compensation.
Cordova noted that if survivors could sue the federal government in civil court, they'd likely receive millions in dollars in settlements — far more than is expected in the event that RECA passes. That being said, 'there is no amount of money that anyone could ever pay me for the pain and suffering that my family has seen…and there is absolutely no way that the government could ever make my family whole again,' she said.
U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), who has sponsored RECA legislation every year since he entered Congress in 2008, and most recently co-sponsored the RECA expansion bill with GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Luján noted the irony of Republicans worrying about the cost of RECA, given that Republicans in the U.S. House are 'about to pass a bill for a third time that's going to add over $2 trillion to the debt.'
Nonetheless, Luján noted, ultimately RECA is a 'bipartisan issue and it has a bipartisan solution — I would argue bipartisan solutions. Alongside our congressional delegation, I commit to continue to work with our bipartisan coalition to keep RECA moving forward.' And to the victims 'still living and suffering…I'll never stop fighting for your stories to be heard and for justice to be delivered.'