Bombs in our Backyard

No other step in the nuclear fuel cycle has affected Utah more than nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. Between 1951 and 1992, 925 nuclear weapons tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) including 100 above-ground tests. Utahns were never told the fallout was dangerous to their health, or to seek shelter as the radioactive clouds rained fallout over their homes, gardens and pastures. We drank milk, not knowing it was laced with strontium-90, which mimics calcium, concentrates in bones, and causes cancer.

Before NTS was opened, the United States conducted tests on distant islands in the Pacific Ocean. This proved to be too expensive and time-consuming for the growing nuclear weapons programs of the late 1940s so the federal government decided to search for a continental nuclear test site. Initially, a site in North Carolina was considered because it would allow the radioactive fallout from tests to fall over the Atlantic Ocean and not over populated areas. However, North Carolina was eventually deemed too costly and politically difficult for nuclear testing. When Nevada was ultimately chosen, it was with full knowledge that many millions of Americans would be exposed to radioactive fallout.

The recklessness did not stop there. During above ground tests, the Atomic Energy Commission would wait until the wind was blowing away from more populated areas such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas and toward Utah. Declassified documents show that the federal government referred to Utah at the time as a "low-use segment of the population." Clearly, the government's desire to test nuclear weapons outweighed the health of Utahns and the millions of Americans impacted by the weapons testing program.

HEAL Utah is working to ensure that nuclear weapons testing never occurs again in Nevada or anywhere else. It is vitally important that we remember the stories of our atomic past in order to better work for a cleaner, healthier future.

One step towards justice

For decades the federal government denied any responsibility for the deaths and illnesses that ravaged Utah’s communities. It wasn’t until 1990 that Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). Pushed by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and the late Congressman Wayne Ownes (D-UT), RECA promises to give $50,000 to each person who developed specific types of cancer attributed to fallout and who lived in one of a handful of counties in Utah, Nevada, or Arizona. Ironically many counties in Utah received more fallout than those included in the RECA program, but because they were not listed in the Act, those Utahns are not eligible for compensation.

In 1983 Congress directed the National Cancer Institute to conduct a study on the health impacts of nuclear testing, particularly with regard to radioactive Iodine-131 (I-131), which is closely linked to thyroid cancer. Fourteen years later, the study was released and provided shocking results: every county in the lower 48 states received some amount of fallout from nuclear tests. Millions of people born between the mid-1940s and the 1960s received significant doses of radiation .

Hotspots were detected throughout the Intermountain West, including Utah, Idaho, and Montana, in the breadbasket states of Iowa and Missouri, and as far east as upstate New York and Vermont.

When the Bush Administration started talk of developing—and perhaps testing—new, bunker-busting weapons in 2003, advocates and downwinders in the Intermountain West joined together to oppose this plan, and to call for compensation for the victims of past nuclear tests.

In 2004 the Utah legislature passed a resolution calling for RECA to be expanded to include all of Utah.

On August first of 2007, Idaho Senator Mike Crapo (R) joined with fellow Senators Craig (ID-R), Baucus (MT-D), and Tester (MT-D) to introduce S. 1917, to include Montana and Idaho in the compensation program.

Thus far, Utah’s Senators Hatch and Bennett are notably absent from the bill’s co-sponsor list, nor have either of the two asked the bill’s sponsor to include Utah in the legislation.
http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,695197087,00.html