Many more families of former Hanford workers may apply for $150,000 in federal compensation under a law awaiting the president's signature.

"The thousands of families that Congress had in mind when it created the program will now be eligible for help," said Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao in a prepared statement.

The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Program offers $150,000 for workers and former workers who had cancer caused by radiation or lung disease caused by beryllium or silica from the nation's nuclear defense programs.

However, until now, in most cases either the worker or a spouse had to be living to collect compensation.

On Friday, Congress approved expanding the program to compensate the adult children of Hanford workers, if neither the worker nor a spouse is still living to collect the benefit. The president is expected to sign it this week.

Until the new legislation was passed, only the children who were young enough to be dependents of a Hanford worker at the time of his or her death -- usually under 18 or students under 23 -- were eligible for compensation.

That excluded the families of many Hanford workers, particularly those who worked at Hanford during World War II.

Many who came to the desert to produce the first plutonium for weapons use were too old to sign up for combat during the war or had already served in the military.

Because of their ages, many of Hanford's earliest workers have died.

That was the case for Karma Yourdan's father.

He arrived at Hanford in 1943, after serving as a Marine, and got a job as a security officer. He worked his way up to chemical operator, remaining at the site until he retired.

"My dad got irradiated twice," Yourdan said.

She suspects that led to his bladder cancer and then the bone cancer diagnosed shortly before his death at age 85.

But because both her father and mother are dead, Yourdan and her siblings have not been able to apply for the program.

"To me, it's not acknowledging these people," she said. "They took the risks. If not for them, we might never have won the war."

She also suspects that workers were most likely to be exposed to radiation during the earliest years of the nation's nuclear program when less was known about nuclear science.

When the Labor Department held four meetings in Richland in June, the definition of survivor was an issue. Because of the long latency period of cancer, many of the people who attended the meetings were adults when their parents died.

Several said the money was less an issue than the government's thanks and acknowledgment that their parents potentially risked their lives to help win WWII and the Cold War.

One woman, who knew that as an adult she wasn't eligible for the program, attended a meeting to describe to Labor officials the many trips she made to a Seattle hospital with her suffering father, who eventually died of cancer.

The Labor Department had expected more applications from former Hanford workers than have been filed in the program's first 412 months. The Kennewick resource center for the program, one of 10 in the nation, has had 670 claims filed. Nationally, more than 14,500 claims have been filed.

Yourdan and others think the low number of applications is partly because of the exclusion of families without a surviving worker or spouse.

Employees at the Kennewick resource center are expecting an increased number of claims under the new law, said Eunice Godfrey, center manager. For an appointment, call 783-1500.

The Kennewick center has already started helping some families file claims for adult children in anticipation the law would pass, she said.

Most claims are for cancer.

Families need to provide as much of the deceased worker's employment history as they can remember and are responsible for finding medical or autopsy records that show a diagnosis of cancer and, if possible, other medical details. The center can give guidance on finding those records.

Then, government guidelines will be used to decide if there's at least a 50 percent chance the radiation exposure caused the cancer.

If a spouse survives the deceased worker, the spouse gets the entire $150,000. If only adult children survive, they would split the $150,000.

For those who are still living, the program also covers medical expenses related to the illness if they're eligible for compensation.