This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the world’s first atomic explosion, which took place on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo. The people who lived nearby were not warned or evacuated and their descendants have never received compensation, unlike victims of other subsequent nuclear testing.
But the recent budget bill signed by President Trump expands the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to include New Mexico victims, and others left out of earlier versions of RECA, such as uranium workers who entered the industry after 1971. Events commemorating the test and its victims take place July 13 in Albuquerque and July 16 in Tularosa.
Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, told KUNM the federal recognition has been a long time coming and the compensation is welcome, but the victory is also bittersweet…