KVIG Informative

A desert bombing range became ground zero for the nation’s nuclear testing program in 1951. The law built to pay for what the fallout did to Nevadans has outlived the testing itself — it lapsed, and Congress revived and expanded it again just last year.

The site now called the Nevada National Security Site started as part of the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, a roughly 3.5 million-acre military training area President Franklin D. Roosevelt established on Oct. 29, 1940, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s official history of the site. The Army Air Corps used the range for aerial gunnery training through World War II.

After the war, the Atomic Energy Commission needed a nuclear weapons testing site inside the continental United States, because security and logistics problems were mounting around the nation’s Pacific testing program, according to the Nevada National Security Site’s own historical account. On Dec. 12, 1950, the commission’s staff concluded that a portion of the Las Vegas range met nearly all of its criteria: remote, within reach of Los Alamos National Laboratory, radiologically safe and workable for year-round testing.

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President Harry S. Truman approved the new Nevada Proving Grounds six days later, on Dec. 18, 1950, according to the Nevada National Security Site’s history. The first atmospheric test, Operation Ranger’s “Able” shot, detonated over Frenchman Flat on Jan. 27, 1951, the same record states. The site was renamed the Nevada Test Site in 1955 and renamed again, to the Nevada National Security Site, in 2010, to “more accurately reflect its evolving mission,” according to the agency.

The Atomic Energy Commission ran the site until Congress abolished the commission itself in 1975, splitting its functions between the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to the Nevada National Security Site’s history. Atmospheric and underground testing continued at the site for decades afterward.

Decades of fallout reached communities downwind of the site and the workers who built and monitored it. Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act on Oct. 5, 1990, paying $50,000 to downwinders near the Nevada Test Site, $75,000 to onsite participants present at atmospheric test locations, and $100,000 to uranium miners, millers and ore transporters, according to a U.S. Department of Justice summary of the program. Congress broadened the law on July 10, 2000.

The program still carried an expiration date, and Congress let it pass. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act lapsed in June 2024 after the House did not act on a reauthorization bill the Senate had already passed, according to U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, a longtime sponsor of the legislation. For more than a year, no new claims could be filed under the law at all.

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Congress revived the program through H.R. 1, a budget reconciliation law enacted July 4, 2025. Sections 100201 through 100205 of that law reauthorize the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act through Dec. 31, 2028, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s summary of the program. The new version raises the downwinder and onsite-participant awards to $100,000, keeps the existing covered counties in Arizona and Nevada, adds downwinder coverage in additional states, and expands protections for uranium workers, including core drillers and remediation workers.

Nevada’s test site has sat inactive for more than three decades, but the law built to answer for what it did is still being rewritten by Congress today, in real time, because the damage didn’t stop when the testing did. The desert stopped shaking in the early 1990s. The bill for it is now scheduled to run through 2028.