The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, is now law and for the first time includes New Mexicans. The people primarily affected in New Mexico were never covered in the past. These include people in the communities of Tularosa, Carrizozo, and Alamogordo. They also include rural parts of Otero and Lincoln County.

“This is a historic event,” said Tina Cordova co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.

Cordova helped start the group in 2005. “It took five years to finally get Congress to listen to what we were saying about the damage that was done to the people of New Mexico,” Cordova said.

Cordova says New Mexicans living near the Trinity site and those in Church Rock near Gallup have been suffering from radiation exposure for decades.

“I think people right now are feeling a great deal of relief, relief that there’s finally going to be acknowledgement,” Cordova said. “I believe, and I always believed, that someday the stars would align just perfectly.”

Cordova says it took her voice and many others to finish this race.

“I know that Senator Hawley from Missouri, who is Republican, worked very, very hard with his Republican colleagues to make sure that they understand,” Cordova said. “So we’re grateful for the work that Senator Hawley did. But let me just remind everybody, without our five members of Congress, without the hard work of Senator Lujan, Senator Heinrich, Representative Leger Fernandez, Representative Stansbury, Representative Vasquez, who represented us so well, who never allowed this to die, who never stopped talking about the importance of this. We wouldn’t have, we wouldn’t have made it to the finish line.”

New Mexico’s delegation did not vote in favor of the bill. In a statement from Senator Martin Heinrich last month, he told KOB “it’s long past time for Congress to expand RECA to include the Tularosa Basin Downwinders. The Senate has already shown overwhelming bipartisan support for doing just that. But tying it to a bill that rips health care away from millions of Americans undermines RECA’s very purpose. We shouldn’t be confronting injustice by inflicting new harm.”

For Cordova, it doesn’t quite feel like she fully won.

“They took the health care out, and we were really hoping for the health care because in New Mexico, where many parts of our state are rural, the health care is very important, and so we’ll continue to fight, and we will obviously do all we can to get as many people enrolled in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act as possible now that it’s going to be available to us,” Cordova said.

There’s plenty more work to be done to get to that point.

“We know that this isn’t that this expansion and extension don’t go far enough. We know that. We know that we will continue to fight in Congress to further the expansion and give us a much longer extension,” Cordova said.

The funding for this current version of RECA will end in 2028.

New Mexico has the second-largest uranium ore reserves in the country. There is a possibility of restarting those mines after President Trump signed executive orders aimed at bolstering the nuclear industry. Also there is a strong probability that New Mexico will be the longer-term spent uranium storage location in the near future as final selection is facilitated by this administration.