Compensation urged for US radiation victims

The US government should compensate people injured from medical testing of radioactive substances over three decades, says the energy secretary, Hazel O'Leary. In interviews with reporters last week O'Leary also suggested that the government's previous resistance to paying the claims of those exposed to fallout from open air atomic bomb tests was wrong.

O'Leary has reacted quickly to news stories detailing medical experiments funded by the Department of Energy's predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. The experiments, which were also funded by the US Public Health Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Defense, affected up to 800 people, in some cases without their knowledge of the …