I don't care what voice you use, I would like you to apologize to the victims.

Mansion in the Storm - op-ed

On June 11, 2024, Congress allowed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to expire. Since 1990, the RECA law has provided a modicum of financial help to a small segment of the worst-affected radiation victims harmed by our nation's nuclear weapons tinkering in the middle of the last century. The recipients of the former RECA law include 'downwinders,' nuclear test site workers and uranium workers--as of today, these Americans who sacrificed for their nation no longer have access to remedies for their radiation-linked diseases from Congress, which failed to extend and expand its 33 year pay-out program for Cold War victims.

Radiation-harmed populations of our nuclear past are now legally forgotten--how long before media and political attention will diminish too, as happened again and again during the long saga of America's forgotten radiation victims? In our previous national 'reflections' of our nuclear past, which were short-lived episodes of American moral clarity, like the present moment, our government initiated various kinds of 'sleuthing' that lacked the hallmarks of traditional riddle-solving. The government repeatedly attempted to shed light on the nuclear past and yet we curiously still have no adequate data on our exposures and no real studies to review our nuclear past. By all cultural appearances, including studies, books, and movies on the topic, the mysteries of America's atomic age have been prematurely ‘solved’ for Americans, but a different reading of the atomic era shows that we aren’t living in the domain of a best-selling narrative.

Imagine, for a moment, if Agatha Christie allowed one of her suspects to conclude the mystery novel for her with a semi-logical assertion as a substitute to the ‘whodonnit.’ Being that semi-logical asserting detective in that alternative Agatha Christie novel ending meant that the challenge was very different. It wasn’t any longer about revelation and arriving at the right answer. It wasn’t about dispelling agonized confusion or pinning blame on the right suspect. It wasn’t about delivering a sense of justice and closure with notes of brilliance and warmth.

America isn't unnerved by the thud of a closing, incomplete tragic nuclear national chapter any more than we are bothered that we are driven by a greater interest that we believe what we want as a nation -- our lesser interest is that our enigmas have lingered.

By not squaring with the realities of our cultural tinkering in atomic alchemy, we remain cognitively stuck in the mansion in the storm. Americans will forever be wondering about the mystery of what we were really exposed to, what the government really knew, and what diseases are lurking in our future, if they hadn’t already sprouted. RECA was a distraction to these legitimate concerns. Neither that law's sunsetting nor the analogy of an Agatha Christie novel can rattle us enough to care that we have become abandoned participants in our own national mysteries.

A new GAO report (Government Accountability Office) has been issued that perhaps waxes philosophical about subcritical nuclear tests. A sidebar titled 'Principles of Zeus' notes that a stimulus to an assembly 'can initiate' a chain reaction 'based on the properties of the assembly, such as the geometry (e.g., sphere or flat sheet) and the density,' which means Zeus was a wise dude. In all seriousness, GAO says that subcrits are getting less subcritical: 'The Zeus system simulates that process by bombarding the subcritical assembly with many additional neutrons to increase the number of fissions and gamma rays.'

Scaled subcritical test 'Pollux'

The Global Conversation about United States sub-critical nuclear experiments

Primer on Transparency on NNSA SNEs

The Department of Energy (DOE) conducted two subcritical nuclear experiments (SNE) in late 2010 and early 2011. This information was only learned following the discovery of a PDF file released by the DOE in June 2011, a record--in lag time of disclosure--that was shattered by former President Joe Biden's new record on subcritical nuclear test notification delays that stands at 209 days. Subcritical nuclear tests aren't zero-yield since they comprise a tiny nuclear explosive yield.

Scaled subcritical testing started under the Obama administration involves greater amounts of fissile fuel and thus higher nuclear explosive releases. A 2019 scaled subcritical test named Ediza breached its steel experimental vessel and leaked radiation in an alcove. (If you can actually define a nuclear test, Congrats—it's alot to take in. It's been going on since the 1930s.)