Radiation list ignores NTS workers

Monday, April 7, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Nevada Test Site workers who witnessed above-ground nuclear weapons tests were not included in last week's request by President Clinton to broaden current compensation for radiation victims.

Radiation survivor groups -- from veterans exposed to nuclear weapons fallout to residents living in the path of radioactive fallout -- criticized the administration's response to an advisory panel that spent 18 months and $6 million researching Cold War experiments exposing humans to radiation.

"I am terribly disappointed with this report," said Pat Broudy, atomic widow and secretary of the National Association of Atomic Veterans. "It was just a useless exercise in futility."

Broudy's husband died after exposures in Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb was dropped, and at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s.

She was responding to Energy Secretary Federico Pena's announcement last week of pursuing funds for uranium miners with lung cancers.

About 600 uranium miners stand to gain $50 million in government compensation, if Congress approves, because they became ill after radiation exposure while mining in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming between 1947 and 1991.

The Department of Energy under former Secretary Hazel O'Leary vowed to reveal secret radiation experiments after news reports in 1993 about 17 people injected with plutonium. The DOE has agreed to settle with them and their families for $6.5 million.

The Task Force on Radiation & Human Rights, representing a coalition of about 30 radiation victims organizations, called for a congressional oversight hearing on the administration's program.

"These programs are good first steps toward addressing serious problems," said E. Cooper Brown, a member of the task force executive committee. "However, we are concerned that unless these matters are more responsibly addressed, a large number of individuals will be excluded from any meaningful relief in their lifetime."

Brown noted that "tens of thousands" of documents about Cold War experiments remain classified and unavailable to the public. "And that's just at the DOE," he said.

The DOE has promised to continue searching its records to uncover any neglected human radiation experiments.

But the task force is not satisfied.

"We are particularly disturbed that the administration continues to hide behind a passive 'outreach and notification' program to find those experimented upon, under the fabricated pretense that few if any were harmed by the experiments," Brown said.