SPOKANE - A woman who is blaming emissions from the Hanford nuclear reservation for the thyroid cancer that is killing her brought many in a federal courtroom to tears as she described her pending death.

Shannon Rhodes, 64, testified Thursday that tests earlier this year found two aggressive new tumors growing inside her. One is around her trachea and the other in her lungs.

She also has an undiagnosed growth at the back of her skull. The Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, woman coughs frequently, and her family says her strength is failing.

"I can feel these tumors now. It scares me. This is the beginning of the end," Rhodes told the 12-person jury as her two grown daughters and her husband held each other and wept.

Many other observers in U.S. District Judge William Nielsen's courtroom also began to cry as Rhodes, responding to questions from her attorney Richard Eymann, described her emotions.

"I'm not afraid of death. I believe the soul goes on and God will greet me on the other side but the pain, the suffocation ..." Rhodes said.

This is the second trial for Rhodes, who is suing the private companies that for decades operated Hanford for the federal government. The site made plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Earlier this week, her doctors said her life will probably end within a few years at most.

Dr. Vernon Holbert, the Spokane surgeon who operated on her lung mass in 2002, said the tumor "could choke her to death. It will paralyze the nerves to her voice box. Her esophagus, the food tube, will be squashed. She'll get weaker and weaker."

Other experts said her end-of-life care will cost between $110,268 and $171,476 for the next one to three years. They said she'd have an estimated 20.2 more years to live if she hadn't gotten terminal cancer, and they estimated economic damages for her shortened life at $218,000 to $278,000.

Defense attorneys for E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. and General Electric Co., the corporations that operated Hanford for the government during World War II and the Cold War, on Thursday asked only a few questions in cross-examination and did not challenge Rhodes in front of the jury.

The defense began presenting its case Thursday.

Dr. Arthur Schneider, a thyroid disease expert at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, discussed a major, recent "pooled analysis" of external radiation studies.

That analysis concluded that the risk of thyroid cancer is greatest for children under 16. But the study didn't show a thyroid cancer risk below 10 rads, a dose lower than Rhodes' estimated dose, Schneider said.

"We can't demonstrate a risk below 10 rads, and if there is risk, it's small," he said.

In other cross-examination since the trial started on Nov. 7, attorneys for DuPont and GE have vigorously challenged the plaintiffs' scientific experts. They contend Rhodes can't show that her estimated thyroid dose of 6.9 rads of radioactive iodine-131 from Hanford's plutonium plants "more likely than not" caused her thyroid cancer, the legal yardstick being used in the trial.

Eymann showed the jury a series of photos depicting Rhodes' early life in Colfax and on her family's 1869 farm homestead near Dusty, 17 miles west of Colfax, where her family grew wheat and barley and kept horses and dairy cows.

The photos showed Rhodes, born Shannon Caldwell, drinking from a large bottle of milk.

According to her lawyers, 95 percent of Rhodes' radiation dose from Hanford was between 1944 and 1947, when huge clouds of radioactive I-131 were pumped out of Hanford plants during production of the world's first plutonium bombs.

The invisible gas settled on pastures, where it was ingested by cows and transferred to the thyroid glands of children when they drank milk.

That "milk pathway" is the primary way that people were exposed to the Hanford emissions, studies show.