ST. LOUIS—The United States Senate could vote as early as Wednesday on a standalone bill that would reauthorize a federal program that pays for medical costs of those exposed to radiation exposure, and expand it to include victims in the St. Louis region dating back to the Manhattan Project era.

The legislation, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., made its way into the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act that passed the Senate last year but was stripped out of the final version that emerged in congressional negotiations despite bipartisan backing and support from the White House.

The existing RECA fund has made payments to more than 40,000 people primarily in the Western U.S. since it was authorized in 1990, Hawley told reporters Monday without reauthorization, the program will go dark on June 7.

Hawley’s bill would add roughly 600,000 claimants, including people with certain illnesses who live or lived in one of 21 St. Louis-area ZIP codes.

“It is vital that Congress move quickly to reauthorize the program and to update it to reflect our knowledge now of just how extensive the federal government’s nuclear program was and the effects on people really were,” Hawley said.

Hawley said Monday that Dawn Chapman, the St. Louis County woman who co-founded JustMomsSTL, an advocacy group for victims of nuclear radiation in the region, would be his guest at Thursday’s State of the Union address. Chapman and other advocates have made several trips to the Capitol over the past six months to lobby for the bill.

Chapman on Monday called for U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to hold a town hall meeting in the St. Louis area to address the contamination issue. Granholm visited the region last year for an unrelated announcement and also toured the Weldon Spring containment site in St. Charles that stores radioactive material from a former nuclear military ordnance site located near Francis Howell High School. She met with U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who has also pushed for a full cleanup of Manhattan Project-era nuclear waste in the region, but did not meet with activists. 

Work to remediate the Coldwater Creek floodplain will continue in the region until at least 2038. Army Corps of Engineers crews have been working on an area near the former Jana Elementary School in Florissant and confirmed Monday that it has started taking soil samples in areas of Cades Cove Drive to determine the potential for contaminated soil underneath homes. More extensive work, which would involve heavy construction equipment, would start within a year, the agency said. 

Hawley has clashed with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell over the legislation issue in the past, accusing him of taking it out of the NDAA as part of a “backroom deal”. The two spoke about the bill on Thursday, a day after McConnell announced he would step down as the Republican leader after the November election. 

Hawley suggested that the result of the vote, which will happen by Friday, will weigh on his decision of whom to back in a leadership race.

“I just can’t imagine supporting someone for the leader of my party in the Senate who is not going to be responsive to the needs of the people of Missouri,” he said.