Sickened by U.S. nuclear program, people turning to Congress for aid

ST. LOUIS>> When Diane Scheig’s father, Bill, came home from work at the Mallinckrodt factory in St. Louis, he would strip down in their garage and hand his clothes to her mother to wash immediately, not daring to contaminate the house with the residue of his labors.

Bill Scheig, an ironworker who helped build the city’s famous arch, never told his family exactly what he was doing at the plant, where scientists first began processing uranium for the Manhattan Project in 1942. But by age 49, he had developed kidney cancer, lost his ability to walk and died.

Decades later, Diane’s older sister Sheryle, who years earlier had given birth to a baby boy born with a softball-size tumor in his stomach, died of brain and lung cancer at 54. Her neighbor two doors down died of appendix cancer at 49. So many of her classmates have died of cancer that a large round table covered with their pictures is now a staple of her high school reunions.

“I know for myself, I was thankful when I passed the age of 49,” Diane Scheig said. “And I was thankful when I passed the age of 54.”

The Mallinckrodt plant processed the uranium that allowed scientists at the University of Chicago to produce the first human-made controlled nuclear reaction, paving the way for the first atomic bomb.

But the factory — and the program it served — left another legacy: A plague of cancer, autoimmune diseases and other mysterious illnesses has ripped through generations of families such as Scheig’s in St. Louis, and other communities across the country that were exposed to the materials used to power the nuclear arms race.

Now Congress is working on legislation that would allow people harmed by the program but so far shut out of a federal law enacted to aid its victims — including in New Mexico, Arizona, Tennessee and Washington state — to receive federal compensation.

In the 1940s, as workers churned out 50,000 tons of uranium to feed the nation’s nascent atomic arsenal, the factory also was spitting out heaps of nuclear waste.

Over the next several decades, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste stored in open steel drums were hauled and dumped across the city. The waste seeped into large swaths of soil, including on land that

later became ball fields.

And it drained into Coldwater Creek, a tributary that snakes through the metropolitan area for 19 miles through backyards and public parks where children play and catch crawfish. In heavy storms, the creek routinely floods.

There are similar stories across the country, among the Navajo workers in New Mexico and Arizona who were sent into mines with a bucket and a shovel to dig up uranium and were never told about the dangers; the children of workers at uranium processing plants in Tennessee and Washington state; and the downwinders across the Southwest who breathed in the fallout from the mushroom clouds of aboveground tests.

None of those communities qualify for aid under the only federal law to compensate civilians who sustained serious illnesses from the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

Passed in 1990, that statute was constructed narrowly to help some uranium miners and a handful of communities who were present for above-ground testing. Claimants, who can include children or grandchildren of those who would have benefited from the program but have since died, receive a one-time payment of $50,000 to $100,000.

The Senate last month passed legislation led by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO., and Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., that would update and dramatically expand the law to include thousands of new participants, including Missouri families such as the Scheigs.

If Congress does not pass the bill before June, the law will expire altogether, shuttering the fund for those who are currently eligible and cutting off access to cancer-screening clinics in neighborhoods that have been hit hard by radioactive exposure and rely on federal money to continue operating.

For years, momentum to expand the nuclear compensation program had sputtered along in fits and starts on Capitol Hill, adopted by

various lawmakers who inched it forward but were not able to secure a vote in the House or Senate.

But it got a shot in the arm when Hawley took up the issue, working with Luján to draft legislation and using his perch on the Armed Services Committee to attach it to the annual defense policy bill.

When the measure finally got a vote on the Senate floor last month — made possible after some horse-trading between Hawley and Sen. Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., the minority leader — it passed 69-30.

Christen Commuso, who grew up near the creek and has lobbied extensively for the expansion of the program through her work for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, has found a small comfort in hoping that the suffering in her family will stop with her.

After Commuso developed thyroid cancer, doctors removed her thyroid, adrenal gland, gallbladder and, eventually, her uterus and ovaries.

At first, Commuso said in an interview, she “really mourned the

loss of my ability to have my own children.”

“But at the same time, there’s a part of me that feels like, well, maybe it was a blessing in disguise,” she said. “Because I didn’t pass something down to a new generation.”

She was in the Senate chamber in March when lawmakers approved the legislation to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to cover Missourians such as her. Just the provision in the existing law to fund screening clinics for survivors would help, she said, because she sometimes skips doctor’s appointments when she cannot afford them.

“I wanted to clap and scream and holler” when it passed, Commuso said.

But she also found it jarring to see how nonchalant senators were as they voted on her fate — with a customary thumbs-up or thumbsdown to the Senate clerk.

“To watch people kind of give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on your life — and does your life matter to them? It’s like, what do you have to say and do to convince people that you matter?”