uranium mines

Across New Mexico, there are over 15,000 areas where abandoned coal mining equipment, facilities, and legacy mine shafts continue to pose serious health, safety, and environmental hazards to rural and urban communities.

At the State of the Union Thursday evening there will be two special guests of New Mexico Congressional members whose presence is designed to get federal compensation for those injured by nuclear weapons production.

On this episode Associate Professor Myrriah Gomez talks about her book “Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos.”

The Senate passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act last week and for the first time, it also approved an amendment that expands the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. This could have a profound impact on people who lived near the site of the 1945 Trinity Test, the first atomic explosion, which took place in southern New Mexico. They have been excluded from compensation, as have uranium miners who did work after 1971. Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinder Consortium, spoke with KUNM the day after the Senate vote.

On this episode we talk with Lucie Genay, author of “Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry.”

As the U.S. prepared to detonate the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in the ’40s, the federal government sought uranium on Navajo land. Decades later,…