A resolution strongly urging the federal government not to resume nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site received unanimous backing during a House committee meeting Wednesday amid committee members' stories of relatives who died or suffer from cancer believed to be connected to Cold War-era nuclear testing.
   "We see in what happened during the 1950s something that could happen again," said Mike Lee, general counsel to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who supports the bill. Lee's father, Rex Lee, a former U.S. solicitor general, died in 1996 of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
    Rep. Michael Noel, R-Kanab, is sponsoring House Concurrent Resolution 7, which "recalls the devastation caused to the health of thousands of citizens" during the 1950s.
    Noel said he decided to sponsor the bill after hearing the federal government wanted to test "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. The news caused "kind of a buzz" in southern Utah, he said.
    While he didn't want to be seen as resisting the government's need to develop defense weaponry, Noel said Utah needed to resist the testing.
    "There's certainly a place for this, but this is not the place," he said.
    According to information included in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, the worst of the testing-related fallout occurred in Washington County, downwind from the test site.
   Kane County was No. 7 on the list. But northern Utah counties also were affected by fallout, something Rep. Craig Buttars, R-Lewiston, said he realized only last year.
    Tearing up as he recalled his father's death from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer attributed to fallout, Buttars said the bill would emphasize the need "to make sure this never happens again."
    Rep. John Mathis, R-Naples, said he also had family members who died as a result of downwind exposure. "I don't know that this [bill] is strong enough," he said.
    The resolution says a resumption of nuclear testing in Nevada "would mean a return to the mistakes and miscalculations of the past, which have marred many Utahns" and would create a new generation of downwinders and "signify a dramatic step backward in the United States of America's resolve to learn from its tragic nuclear testing legacy."
    Noel said a "Wind Wall" commemorative monument paid for through private donations would be placed in or near Washington County.