In 2001, my husband, Tony, had his thyroid removed. The doctor who discovered his cancer told him that it was caused by exposure to radiation.

Tony was born in Payson in 1941, so he was ten years old when the first nuclear weapons test exploded at the Nevada Test Site on January 27, 1951. At the time, Payson, like many others towns throughout Utah County, was a small farming community where families grew their own vegetables and got their milk from someone down the road.

The January 27 test was only the first of nearly a thousand nuclear weapons tests which for decades placed Utahns directly in the path of radioactive debris. These tests, which finally ended in 1992 because of a temporary moratorium, blanketed the state with radioactive fallout. The fallout contaminated gardens, drinking supplies and concentrated in the bodies of people throughout Utah, including the young Tony Pickering in Payson.

In 1991, the National Cancer Institute released a study which showed that Utah County ranked 23rd in terms of exposure to fallout nationwide. A follow-up study in 1997 found that up to 212,000 cases of thyroid cancer across the U.S. could be traced back to the nuclear weapons tests in Nevada. A few years back, the Daily Herald reported that one test, Shot Schooner on Dec. 8, 1968, released 15,000 curies of radiation over Utah County, raising radiation levels to 160 times over normal background levels.

While Utah County received some of the highest exposure to fallout in Utah, local residents aren't eligible for compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). Federal officials chose ten counties in southwestern Utah to compensate, even though Utah County received six times more radiation than six of them. This means that my husband, who was diagnosed with radiation-related thyroid cancer, was never compensated for his medical expenses. Meanwhile, people with the same illness who lived in Redmond, Utah, just an hour south, are eligible for compensation.

The Daily Herald interviewed Tony in 2004, not long before he died of the thyroid cancer that spread throughout his bones and lungs. The article quotes Sen. Orrin Hatch's spokesman as saying that the Senator knew there were, "almost certainly additional geographic areas that need to be added to RECA."

In the eight years since Hatch's office realized that RECA was incomplete, I lost my husband to thyroid cancer. For eight years, downwinders just like my husband have grown increasingly ill. I shudder to think how many of them have shared Tony's fate while waiting for Sen. Hatch to act on what he knew to be true in 2004.

The U.S. Senate has declared today the first national day of remembrance for downwinders. Properly commemorating us requires more than a day of remembrance. It requires making the temporary moratorium on nuclear testing permanent by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It requires expanding RECA so that its boundaries are based on exposure rates -- not politics.

While we've come to expect that Sen. Hatch will make excuses for his unwillingness to support downwinders, Sen. Mike Lee may prove to do the opposite. In a May 25, 2010 KRCL radio interview with downwinder Mary Dickson, Sen. Lee said he would support the expansion of RECA if elected to the Senate. I hope that Sen. Lee takes his campaign promise to champion downwinders far more seriously than did Sen. Hatch. As we observe the day of remembrance, let's make sure that they get the justice they deserve.