Pacific nuclear victims awarded one billion dollars

0 Comments | AFP, April, 2007

MAJURO (AFP) — Residents from a Marshall Islands atoll exposed to fallout from US nuclear tests have been awarded more than one billion dollars of compensation, but may never receive a cent of it.

The Marshall Islands-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which issued the ruling Tuesday, has virtually no money to pay the award and has labeled United States-provided compensation "manifestly inadequate."

The ruling was issued more than 15 years after the claim was first filed by leaders from Rongelap, a low-lying western Pacific coral atoll engulfed in snow-like nuclear fallout from the 1954 Bravo test at nearby Bikini atoll.

Bravo was the biggest ever US nuclear test and was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs which devastated the Japanese cities of...