Buckner

7. Introduction.

The origins of this case trace back more than sixty years to the height of World War II when the federal government solicited Appellants E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., General Electric, Inc., UNC Nuclear Industries, Inc., Atlantic Richfield Co., and Rockwell International Corp., (collectively “Defendants”) to operate the Han-ford Nuclear Weapons Reservation (“Han-ford”) in southeastern Washington. The Hanford Reservation was a plutonium-production facility that helped make the atomic bomb that dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in World War II.

A regrettable Hanford byproduct was the radioiodine emitted into the surrounding area. The plaintiffs in this litigation are over two thousand residents who now claim that these emissions, known as I-131, caused various cancers and other life-threatening diseases. The first group of plaintiffs filed a complaint in 1990 under the federal statute governing nuclear accidents, the Price-Anderson Act (“PAA”), claiming they were entitled to damages for injuries arising from a nuclear incident pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 2210 . The history is discussed in our earlier opinions in In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation, 292 F.3d…