The move comes as fellow Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett is twisting arms to add money to bail out the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) fund after he voted in favor of a bill last month that rejected the Bush administration's $72 million request to keep it solvent.

"We've been fighting to make sure RECA claimants do not receive IOUs because the program ran out of funds," Hatch said Friday as he and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin announced they had inserted language into the 2005 defense spending authorization bill to pay claims by uranium miners, millers and transporters through an Energy Department workers compensation program.

"These uranium workers will now receive the same benefits that other atomic weapons program workers receive and RECA has more money to pay downwinders who have suffered from exposure," said Hatch.

House and Senate negotiators finished the defense authorization bill at 2 a.m. EDT on Friday and it is expected to pass both chambers and to be signed into law by President Bush.

RECA compensation awards to nonfederal employees who excavated, processed or delivered uranium for America's Cold War nuclear weapons program will now be paid out of the fully funded Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act account.

That move reduces demand on the overtaxed RECA fund, which pays $50,000 to people who have contracted forms of cancer potentially caused by Cold War era nuclear test fallout. But it doesn't eliminate chances of more shortages.

The Bush administration sought to plug this year's expected gap in RECA funding with extra money pulled from the 2005 appropriation to the Commerce, Justice and State departments, but the chairman of the subcommittee in charge of those purse strings, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., refused.

"The RECA fund has always been mandatory money that comes out of defense and to have it be discretionary coming out of commerce caught Judd by complete surprise," said Bennett. "I have spoken to him and he said he will look at it and see what he can do to put it back in the conference committee."

Bennett said Gregg's elimination of the RECA bailout from the Senate version of the spending bill "was not high on our congressional radar" when he and other Western lawmakers voted unanimously Sept. 15 in favor of the Commerce Subcommittee's proposed funding of the agencies.

But Bennett's Democratic challenger Paul Van Dam, who has criticized the incumbent's votes in favor of funding research into "bunker buster" nuclear weapons, said Bennett should have been more vigilant for Utah downwinders.

"I certainly think a lot more needs to be done for these folks and we should have a much stronger advocate than Senator Bennett in looking out for this program," Van Dam said. "In light of the amount of money being expended on defense, it's just stunning to me that a tiny amount can't be put aside for this deserving program."

Bennett said he "will be making every effort next year to rationalize this mess in a way that provides a stable funding source" for the RECA program. And the pot of money he intends to skim some RECA funding from is the nuclear weapons stockpile maintenance program at the Nevada Test Site, the source of the 126 fallout clouds that floated across the American West during the era of above-ground bomb testing.

"They should be able to take a haircut in what they are doing now since they are not doing any testing," Bennett said. "If somebody has to tighten their belt to see that the RECA people get what they deserve, these ought to be the people."