A debt long overdue.(compensation to sick nuclear industry workers)

Nuclear weapons work made people sick--at last, workers may be compensated.

CLARA HARDING WAS USED TO telling the story of her husband Joe's bitterly slow and painful death from stomach cancer. Since his death in 1980, she had repeated it over and over again to government officials and representatives of Union Carbide--which for 30 years managed the Energy Department's uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky--all in an effort to get her husband's pension.

In 1971, Union Carbide, citing a leg injury Harding suffered at the plant, promised him a full-disability pension--if he would retire quietly. Harding, who after 17 years on the job was already suffering from several work-related ailments, agreed. The checks, however, never arrived, and Harding's medical insurance and pension were later rejected. "This left me 50 years old with no job, and a crippled leg," wrote Harding shortly before his death. "No Stomach. Bad lungs. No way to get a job, no way to make a living."

After Joe's death, Clara sold her house and began baby-sitting to make ends meet. In the meantime, she continued to fight for her husband's pension in court for several years, before finally accepting a nominal settlement. (Union Carbide and the Energy Department felt so threatened by the pension case that they sent more than a dozen lawyers and experts to confront Clara and her attorney in court.)

On September 21, 2000, Clara, by then in her late 70s and still baby-sitting, was ready to tell her story again, this time ti) members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, which was debating whether to support a compensation program for workers who had become ill while laboring in the government's nuclear weapons complex.

Although the Senate voted to adopt the compensation program three months earlier as part of the 2001 Defense Authorization Bill, several House Republicans were speaking out against the measure, arguing that there had been no House committee hearings and that the program would be too costly. Leading the opposition was Cong. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who chaired the subcommittee.

Clara, along with several former workers, union representatives, and government officials--including then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson--had been invited to testify before the subcommittee. According to Richard Miller, then the lead lobbyist for the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), the hearing proved to be a strategic blunder for opponents of the bill. Instead of providing the momentum to kill the bill, "the hearing inadvertently created a media platform for continued scrutiny" of the plight of the workers.

As reporters from the Associated Press, USA Today, CNN, and several other major press outlets looked on, former nuclear workers recounted how they had been made ill after being exposed to the numerous toxic and radioactive materials used in the government's bomb program, how their employers had systematically lied about the dangers of their work, and how the government had spared no expense in fending off their requests for compensation. Ann Orick, a former worker who contracted a host of debilitating ailments while employed at the government's uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, told the subcommittee: "It is not right that we should have to come here to plead for a bill to pass. We're not asking for the moon. We're just asking for some help."

Secretary Richardson supported the workers' claims: "The nation shares a shameful legacy of neglect.... I have learned that the government and the contractors were almost, in many cases, not always straight with the workers about their illnesses and that is wrong and as a government we need to redress that grievance."

It was Clara Harding who provided the hearing's most memorable moment. The year before, in September 1999, Richardson visited Paducah soon after a series of articles in the Washington Post revealed that workers there had unknowingly been exposed to plutonium. During a town hall meeting, Richardson admitted that the government had not been "forthcoming" about workplace exposures at the plant. "On behalf of the United States government, I am here to say I am sorry.... The men and women who have worked in this facility helped the United States win the Cold War and now help us keep the peace. We recognize and won't forget our obligation to them."

Near the end of his speech that day, Richardson said, "Before I close, I want to recognize someone in your community who--with courage, persistence, and determination--has reminded us of that obligation: Mrs. Clara Harding ... the widow of Mr. Joe Harding, a former worker at Paducah. I want to present you with this gold medal as a symbol of our sincere appreciation."

During a private meeting with Clara and her attorney, Jackie Kittrell, Richardson asked if there was anything he could do for her. Clara responded, "I want my pension." Richardson promised he would look into it and advised Kittrell to speak with the Energy Department's general counsel. Instead of expediting the request, says Kittrell, the general counsel dragged the process out for months, arguing that Energy couldn't do anything because the pension was Union Carbide's responsibility. Exasperated, Clara asked Kittrell to tell Richardson's office that she wanted to go to Washington to personally return the medal. But later, after Energy agreed to allow a "neutral evaluator" to resolve the pension case, Clara decided to bring up the medal at the upcoming House subcommittee hearing. (Although the evaluator eventually settled in favor of Clara, Kittrell says they have received no word from Energy about when or if pension checks will be issued.)

Almost a year to the day after Richardson's visit, Clara found herself in front of the subcommittee, armed with her gold medal and determined to shame…