Deseret News
 

And that's just a tiny part of a bill he reintroduced recently designed to protect Americans if nuclear weapons testing in Nevada ever resumes.

The bill would also order environmental impact studies before every test; public notice of the time and place of each test; public notice of any time radiation escapes beyond the Nevada Test Site; programs to track any escaped radiation; creating a citizens review board for the Test Site; and public meetings to discuss results and effects of any tests.

But maybe the biggest provision is ordering within three years after passage a study to estimate how much radiation was spread by old tests and where it spread. It would also create a Center for the Study of Radiation and Human Health to help figure out how much danger Utah and others faced from the tests.

"Like thousands of Utah families, I am painfully aware of the federal government's failure to protect its citizens from the dangers of radioactive fallout," Matheson said. "The federal government said we were safe. The federal government knew we were at risk. I will not stand by and let the government take Utah families down that path again."

He originally introduced the bill in 2004 when Congress funded the study of new types of nuclear weapons. Congress has since denied additional funding requests. In 2007, protests by Matheson and others helped cancel testing of a 700-ton non-nuclear device dubbed "Divine Strake," showing that potentially dangerous testing is still possible.

Matheson said, "I remember my father telling me about how people in southern Utah would watch the sky light up from the nuclear tests and how Utahns supported the program because they were strong patriots. Many untimely deaths later, we've learned to be skeptical of the government's safety claims regarding this issue."

The preamble to Matheson's bill notes that 900 nuclear weapons tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992, when a moratorium was placed on them.

Of those tests, 100 were exploded above ground and about a quarter of them were larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The other tests were detonated underground, but some vented to the surface spreading debris and radiation downwind anyway.

Matheson complains that the government studied only the spread and effects of iodine-131, just one of about 150 different radionuclides scattered by tests.

Also in 1990, Congress passed a law to compensate some victims of some types of cancer in a few counties downwind. But Matheson said radiation from the tests has been "documented in all of the contiguous 48 states, with some counties in the Midwest and the eastern United States receiving more fallout than some areas directly downwind of the Nevada Test Site."

Matheson said, "We need much more accountability from the federal government before we even consider putting citizens at risk again."

So his bill also calls within three years of passage for the government to complete "a study to estimate the dose of all radionuclides" from previous tests.

J. Preston Truman, director of Downwinders, which represents downwind cancer victims of the testing, said, "I think it is important and wise to have this bill reintroduced. There still remains talk in the DoD (Department of Defense) … that we may want to either test some of our existing aging weapons, or produce a new warhead to keep our deterrence perfect."

Truman said that means "those downwind remain at risk for new tests. Anything that slows and forces reason to prevail truly adds to our safety."